Platform of the Opposition - a must read document!

[daft punk]

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1927/opposition/cover2.jpg



I think all socialists should read this. Stalinists should so they know what they are attacking, Trots should because it is very useful.

It was Trotsky in 1927, summarising what he thought Stalin was doing wrong, and obviously writing it got him kicked out of the country.

Yet the thing Trotsky wrote in it were all soon proved true.

It would be interesting to hear some views of people who have read it, here is the link and the intro..



http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1927/opposition/index.htm

Platform of the Joint Opposition

1927

Chapter 1
Introductory


IN HIS speech at the last party congress he attended, Lenin said:
Here we have lived a year, with the state in our hands, and under the New Economic Policy has it operated our way? No. We don’t like to acknowledge this, but it hasn’t. And how has it operated? The machine isn’t going where we guide it, but where some illegal, or lawless, or God-knows-whence-derived speculators or private capitalistic businessmen, or both together, are guiding it. A machine doesn’t always travel just exactly the way, and it often travels just exactly not the way, that the man imagines who sits at the wheel.
In those words was given the criterion by which we ought to judge the fundamental problems of our politics. In what direction is the machine travelling? The State? The power? Is it travelling in the direction that we, Communists, expressing the interests and will of the workers and the enormous mass of the peasants, desire? Or not in that direction? Or “not exactly” in that direction?
In these years since the death of Lenin, we have more than once tried to bring the attention of the central organs of our party, and afterward the party as a whole, to the fact that, thanks to incorrect leadership, the danger indicated by Lenin has greatly increased. The machine is not going in the direction demanded by the interests of the workers and peasants. On the eve of the new congress we consider it our duty, notwithstanding all the persecution we are suffering, to call the party’s attention with redoubled energy to this fact. For we are sure that the situation can be corrected, and corrected by the party itself.
When Lenin said that the machine often goes where it is directed by forces hostile to us, he called our attention to two facts of supreme importance. First, that there exist in our society these forces hostile to our cause – the kulak, the Nepman, the bureaucrat – availing themselves of our backwardness and our political mistakes, and relying upon the support of international capitalism. Second, the fact that these forces are so strong that they can push our governmental and economic machine in the wrong direction, and ultimately even attempt – at first in a concealed manner – to seize the wheel of the machine.
Lenin’s words laid upon us all the following obligations:


To watch vigilantly the growth of these hostile forces – kulak, Nepman, and bureaucrat;
To remember that in proportion to the general revival of the country, these forces will strive to unite, introduce their own amendments’ into our plans, exercise an increasing pressure upon our policy, and satisfy their interests through our apparatus;
To take all possible measures to weaken the growth, unity, and pressure of these hostile forces, preventing them from creating that actual, although invisible, dual-power system toward which they aspire;
To tell candidly the whole truth about these processes to all the toiling masses. In this now consists the fundamental problem as to a “Thermidorian” danger and the struggle against it.

Since Lenin uttered his warning, many things have improved with us, but many also have grown worse. The influence of the state apparatus is growing, but with it also the bureaucratic distortion of the workers’ state. The absolute and relative growth of capitalism in the country and its absolute growth in the cities are beginning to produce a political self-consciousness in the bourgeois elements of our country. These elements are trying to demoralize – not always unsuccessfully – that part of the Communists with whom they come in contact at work and in social intercourse. The slogan given by Stalin at the Fourteenth Party Congress, “Fire to the left!” could not but promote this union of the right elements in the party with the bourgeois Ustrialov elements in the country.
The question, “Who will beat whom?” will be decided in a continuous struggle of classes on all sectors of the economic, political, and cultural fronts – a struggle for a socialist or a capitalist course of development, for a distribution of the national income corresponding to one or the other of these two courses, for a solid political power of the proletariat or a division of this power with the new bourgeoisie. In a country with an overwhelming majority of small and very small peasants, and small proprietors in general, the most important processes of this struggle will frequently go on in a fragmentary and underground manner, only to burst “unexpectedly” to the surface all at once.
The capitalist element finds its primary expression in a class differentiation in the country, and in a multiplication of private traders in the city. The upper levels in the country and the bourgeois elements in the city are interweaving themselves more and more closely with the various links of our state-economic apparatus. And this apparatus not infrequently helps the new bourgeoisie to wrap up in a statistical fog its successful effort to increase its share in the national income.
The trade apparatus – state, co-operative, and private – devours an enormous share of our national income, more than one-tenth of the gross production. Furthermore, private capital, in its capacity as commercial middleman, has handled in recent years considerably more than a fifth of all trade – in absolute figures, more than five milliards a year. Up to now, the general consumer has received more than 50 per cent of the products he needs from the hands of the private capitalists. For the private capitalist this is the fundamental source of profit and accumulation. The disparity (scissors’) between agricultural and industrial prices, between wholesale and retail prices, the rupture between prices in the different branches of agriculture in the different regions and seasons, and finally the difference between domestic and world prices (contraband), are a constant source of private gain.
Private capital is collecting usurious interest on loans and is making money on government bonds.
The role of the private capitalist in industry is also very considerable. Even though it has decreased relatively in the recent period, still it has grown absolutely. Registered private capitalistic industry shows a gross production of 400 millions a year. Small, home, and handicraft industries show more than 1,800 millions. Altogether, the production of the non-state industries constitutes more than a fifth of the whole production of goods, and about 40 per cent of the commodities in the general market. The overwhelming bulk of this industry is bound up one way or another with private capital. The various open or concealed forms of exploitation of the mass of handicraft workers by commercial and home-enterprise capital are an extremely important and, moreover, a growing source of accumulation for the new bourgeoisie.
Taxes, wages, prices, and credit are the chief instruments of distribution of the national income, strengthening certain classes and weakening others.
The agricultural tax in the country is imposed, as a general rule, in an inverse progression: heavily upon the poor, more lightly upon the economically strong and upon the kulaks. According to approximate calculations, 34 per cent of the poor peasant proprietors of the Soviet Union (even omitting provinces with a highly developed class differentiation, such as the Ukraine, Northern Caucasus, and Siberia) receive 18 per cent of the net income. Exactly the same total income, 18 per cent, is received by the highest group, constituting only 7.5 per cent of the proprietors. Yet both these groups pay approximately the same amount, 20 per cenf each of the total tax. It is evident from this that on each individual poor farm the tax lays a much heavier burden than on the kulak, or the “well-to-do’ proprietor in general. Contrary to the fears of the leaders of the Fourteenth Congress, our tax-policy by no means strips’ the kulak. It does not hinder him in the least from concentrating in his hands a continually greater accumulation in money and kind.
The role of the indirect taxes in our budget is growing alarmingly at the expense of the direct. By that alone the tax-burden automatically shifts from the wealthier to the poorer levels. The taxation of the workers in 1925-1926 was twice as high as in the preceding year, while the taxation of the rest of the urban population diminished by 6 per cent. [1] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1927/opposition/ch01.htm#n1) The liquor tax falls, with more and more unbearable heaviness, precisely upon the industrial regions. The growth of income per person for 1926 as compared with 1925 – according to certain approximate calculations – constituted, for the peasants, 19 per cent; for the workers, 26 per cent; for the merchants and the industrialists, 46 per cent. If you divide the “peasants’ into three fundamental groups, it will appear beyond a doubt that the income of the kulak increased incomparably more than that of the worker. The income of the merchants and industrialists, calculated on the basis of the tax data, is undoubtedly represented as less than it is. However, even these somewhat coloured figures clearly testify to a growth of class differences.
The “scissors”, representing the disparity of agricultural and industrial prices, have drawn still farther apart during the last year and a half. The peasant received for his produce not more than one and a quarter times the pre-war price, and he paid for industrial products not less than two and one-fifth times as much as before the war. This over-payment by the peasants, and again predominantly by the lower level of the peasants, constituting in the past year a sum of about a milliard rubles, not only increases the conflict between agriculture and industry, but greatly sharpens the differentiation in the country.
On the disparity between wholesale and retail prices, the state industry loses, and also the consumer, which means that there is a third party who gains. It is the private capitalist who gains, and consequently capitalism.
Real wages in 1927 stand, at the best, at the same level as in the autumn of 1925. Yet it is indubitable that during the two years intervening the country has grown richer, the total national income has increased, the kulak levels in the country have increased their reserves with enormous rapidity, and the accumulations of the private capitalist, the merchant, the speculator have grown by leaps and bounds. It is clear that the share of the working class in the total income of the country has fallen, while the share of other classes has grown. This fact is of supreme importance in appraising our whole situation.
Only a person who believes at the bottom of his heart that our working class and our party are not able to cope with the difficulties and dangers can affirm that a frank indication of these contradictions in our development, and of the growth of these hostile forces, is panic or pessimism. We do not accept this view. It is necessary to see the dangers clearly. We point them out accurately, precisely in order to struggle with them more effectively and to overcome them.
A certain growth of the hostile forces, the kulak, the Nepman, and the bureaucrat, is unavoidable under the New Economic Policy. You cannot destroy these forces by mere administrative order or by simple economic pressure. In introducing the NEP and carrying it through, we ourselves created a certain place for capitalistic relations in our country, and for a considerable time to come we still have to recognize them as inevitable. Lenin merely reminded us of a naked truth which the workers have to know, when he said:
While we continue to be a small peasant country, there is a more solid basis for capitalism in Russia than for communism. That we must remember ... We have not torn out capitalism by the roots, and we have not undermined the foundation and basis of the internal enemy. [2] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1927/opposition/ch01.htm#n2)
The supremely important social fact here indicated by Lenin cannot, as we said, be simply destroyed, but we can overcome it by way of a correct, planned and systematic working-class policy, relying upon the peasant poor and an alliance with the middle peasant. This policy basically consists in an all.round strengthening of all the social positions of the proletariat, in the swiftest possible elevation of the commanding centres of socialism, in closest possible connexion with the preparation and development of the world proletarian revolution.
A correct Leninist policy also includes manoeuvring. In struggling against the forces of capitalism, Lenin often employed a method of partial concession in order to outflank the enemy, temporary retreat in order afterwards to move forward more successfully. Manoeuvring is also necessary now. But in dodging and manoeuvring against an enemy that could not be overthrown by direct attack, Lenin invariably remained upon the line of the proletarian revolution. Under him the party always knew the causes of each manoeuvre, its meaning, its limits, the line beyond which it ought not to go, and the position at which the proletarian advance should begin again. In those days, under Lenin, a retreat was called a retreat – a concession, a concession. Thanks to that, the manoeuvring proletarian army always preserved its unity, its fighting spirit, its clear consciousness of the goal.
In the recent period there has been a decisive departure on the part of leaders from these Leninist ways. The Stalin group is leading the party blindfold. Concealing the forces of the enemy, creating everywhere and in everything an official appearance of success, this group gives the proletariat no prospect – or, what is worse, a wrong prospect. It moves in zigzags, accommodating itself to and ingratiating itself with hostile elements. It weakens and confuses the forces of the proletarian army. It promotes the growth of passivity, distrust of the leadership and lack of confidence in the forces of the revolution. It disguises, with references to Leninist manoeuvring, an unprincipled jumping from one side to the other, always unexpected by the party, incomprehensible to it, weakening its strength. The only result is that the enemy, having gained time, moves forward. The “classical’ examples of this kind of manoeuvre on the part of Stalin, Bukharin and Rykov, are their Chinese policy and their policy with the Anglo-Russian Committee, on the international field, and within the country, their policy towards the kulak. On all these questions, the party and the working class found out the truth, or a part of the truth, only after the heavy consequences of a policy that was false to the bottom had crashed over their heads.
At the end of these two years in which the Stalin group has really determined the policies of the central institutions of our party, we may consider it fully proven that this group has been powerless to prevent:


An immoderate growth of those forces which desire to turn the development of our country into capitalistic channels;
a weakening of the position of the working class and the poorest peasants against the growing strength of the kulak, the Nepman, and the bureaucrat;
a weakening of the general position of the workers’ state in the struggle with world capitalism, a worsening of the international position of the Soviet Union.

The direct guilt of the Stalin group is that instead of telling the party, the working class, and the peasants the whole truth about the situation, it has concealed the facts, minimised the growth of the hostile forces, and shut the mouths of those who demanded the truth and laid it bare.
The concentration of fire to the left, at a time when the whole situation indicates danger on the right, the crudely mechanical suppression of every criticism expressing the legitimate alarm of the proletariat for the fate of the proletarian revolution, the outright connivance in every deviation to the right, the sapping of the influence of the proletarian and old-Bolshevik nucleus of the party – all these things are weakening and disarming the working class at a moment which demands above all activity of the proletariat, vigilance and unity of the party, faithfulness to its real inheritance of Leninism.
The party leaders distort Lenin, improve upon him, explain him, supplement him, according as it is necessary to conceal each successive mistake that they make. Since Lenin’s death a whole series of new theories has been invented, whose meaning is solely this: that they give theoretical justification to the departure of the Stalin group from the course of the international proletarian revolution. The Mensheviks, the Smienaviekhovtsy and finally the capitalistic press see and welcome in the policies and new theories of Stalin-Bukharin-Martynov a movement “forward from Lenin” (Ustrialov), “statesmanlike wisdom”, “realism”, a renunciation of the “utopias” of revolutionary Bolshevism. In the cutting off from party leadership of a number of Bolsheviks – Lenin’s comrades in arms – they see and openly welcome a practical step towards changing the fundamental course of the party.
Meanwhile the elemental processes of the NEP, not restrained and directed by a firm class policy, are preparing further dangers of the same kind.
Twenty-five million small farms constitute the fundamental source of the capitalist tendencies in Russia. The kulak stratum, gradually emerging from this mass, is realizing the process of primitive accumulation of capital, digging a deep mine under the socialist position. The further destiny of this process depends ultimately upon the relation between the growth of the State economy and the private. The falling behind of our industry vastly increases the tempo of class-differentiation among the peasants and the political dangers arising from it.
Lenin wrote:
In the history of other countries the kulaks have more than once restored the power to landlords, Tsars, priests and capitalists. It has been so in all previous European revolutions, where, in consequence of the weakness of the workers, the kulaks have succeeded in reverting from a republic to monarchy, from the rulership of the toiling masses to the omnipotence of the exploiters, the rich, the parasites.
You can reconcile the kulak with the landlord, the Tsar, and the priest easily enough, even though they’ve had a quarrel, but with the working class, never. [3] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1927/opposition/ch01.htm#n3)
Whoever fails to understand this, whoever believes in “the kulak’s growing into socialism’, is good for just one thing – to run the revolution aground.
There exist in this country two mutually exclusive fundamental positions. One, the position of the proletariat building socialism, the other, the position of the bourgeoisie aspiring to switch our development on to capitalist lines.
The camp of the bourgeoisie and those layers of the petty bourgeoisie who trail after it are placing all their hopes upon the private initiative and the personal interest of the commodity producer. This camp is staking its play on the “economically strong’ peasant, aiming to make the co-operatives, industry and our foreign trade serve this peasant’s interest. This camp believes that socialist industry ought not to count upon the state budget, that its development ought not to be rapid enough to injure the interest of accumulation by the farmer capitalist. The struggle for an increased productivity of labour means to the daily consolidating petty bourgeois putting pressure on the muscles and nerves of the workers. The struggle for lower prices means to him a cutting down of the accumulation of the socialist industries in the interest of commercial capital. The struggle with bureaucratism means to him the dissipation of industry, the weakening of the planning centres. It means the pushing into the background of the heavy industries – that is, again, an adjustment in favour of the economically strong peasant, with the near prospect of an abandonment of the monopoly of foreign trade. This is the course of the Ustrialovs. The name of this course is capitalism on the instalment plan. It is a strong tendency in our country, and exercises an influence upon certain circles of our party.
The proletarian course was described by Lenin in the follow-words:
We can consider the victory of socialism over capitalism, and its permanence, guaranteed, only when the proletarian state power, having conclusively suppressed the resistance of the exploiters and assured itself of their complete subjection and its own complete stability and authority, reorganizes the whole of industry on the basis of large-scale collective production and the latest technique (based on electrification of the entire economy). Only this will make possible such a far-reaching technical and social assistance rendered by the cities to the backward and undifferentiated country as will create the material basis for an immense increase of the productiveness of agricultural and rural labour, impelling the small peasants, by the strength of example and their own interest, to pass over to large-scale, collective, mechanized agriculture. [4] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1927/opposition/ch01.htm#n4)
The whole policy of our party ought to be built up upon this principle – budget, taxes, industry, agriculture, domestic and foreign trade, everything. That is the fundamental stand of the Opposition. That’s the road to socialism.
Between those two positions – every day drawing nearer to the first – the Stalinists are tracing a line consisting of short zigzags to the left and deep ones to the right. The Leninist course is a socialist development of the productive forces in course is a development of the productive forces on a capitalist continual struggle with the capitalist element. The Ustrialov course is a development of the productive forces on a capitalist basis by way of a gradual eating away of the conquests of October. The Stalin course leads, in objective reality, to a delaying of the development of the productive forces, to a lowering of the relative weight of the socialist element, and thus prepares for the final victory of the Ustrialov course. The Stalin course is the more dangerous and ruinous, in that it conceals a real deviation under the mask of familiar words and phrases. The completion of our restoration process has brought forward the whole fundamental question of our economic development and thus has undermined the position of Stalin, which is completely inadequate to meet great problems – whether the revolution in China or the reconstruction of basic capital in the Soviet Union.
Notwithstanding the tension of the situation, heightened in the extreme by the crude mistakes of the present leadership, matters can be put right. But it is necessary to change the line of the party leadership, and change it sharply, in the direction indicated by Lenin.

[daft punk]

Please at least read the intro before replying, otherwise you are just wasting everyone's time.

[Red Storm]

What does Trotsky mean by 'dual-power system to which they aspire'? I am talking about #3, in the first numbered sequence from the introduction, which is actually attributed to Lenin. Is he speaking of Capitalist control of both sides? From what I have studied I believe that the capitalist powers that be sought to exploit the USSR as just another side of the same coin.

[daft punk]

He is talking about the capitalists and kulaks (rich peasants) in Russia vying for control against the state. Dual power would mean the wealthy in Russia had roughly as much power as the government. Dual power can precipitate revolutions or counter revolutions. Trotsky was warning that letting the rich get richer gave them more power and more confidence to bid for power. Also there was a big bureaucracy inherited from the Tsar. They also bid for power in very sneaky ways, running rings around the communists, with their superior knowledge. Lenin wrote about that:

"If we take Moscow with its 4,700 Communists in responsible positions, and if we take that huge bureaucratic machine, that gigantic heap, we must ask: who is directing whom? I doubt very much whether it can truthfully be said that the Communists are directing that heap. To tell the truth they are not directing, they are being directed."

"Communists who are put at the head of departments—and sometimes artful saboteurs deliberately put them in these positions in order to use them as a shield—are often fooled. This is a very unpleasant admission to make, or, at any rate, not a very pleasant one; but I think we must admit it, for at present this is the salient problem. I think that this is the political lesson of the past year; and it is around this that the struggle will rage in 1922."

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/mar/27.htm

Well, it became worse and worse. Stalin used Trotsky's battle against all this against Trotsky, basing himself on the bureaucracy, the kulaks and NEPmen etc who were all getting richer.

[Red Storm]

Ah, ok. Thank you, Daft Punk, for taking the time to share that insight with me. I do appreciate it and you clarified that very well. I also want to thank you for the book recommendation that you made on my thread. I must say that I have not read too much on Trotsky. Or maybe I should say I have not read the political works of Trotsky enough and I think that I will take your suggestion on that one.

[A Marxist Historian]

What does Trotsky mean by 'dual-power system to which they aspire'? I am talking about #3, in the first numbered sequence from the introduction, which is actually attributed to Lenin. Is he speaking of Capitalist control of both sides? From what I have studied I believe that the capitalist powers that be sought to exploit the USSR as just another side of the same coin.

No, dual power usually means two different class powers vying for control, as with the Soviets vs. the Provisional Government in 1917, surely the model Trotsky was thinking about, and Lenin too.

He is speculating on the possibility of the capitalist elements *within* the USSR, not outside, the NEPmen and kulaks, creating an alternate, "dual" power aspiring for control over the USSR.

-M.H.-

[daft punk]

Ah, ok. Thank you, Daft Punk, for taking the time to share that insight with me. I do appreciate it and you clarified that very well. I also want to thank you for the book recommendation that you made on my thread. I must say that I have not read too much on Trotsky. Or maybe I should say I have not read the political works of Trotsky enough and I think that I will take your suggestion on that one.

no problem!


No, dual power usually means two different class powers vying for control, as with the Soviets vs. the Provisional Government in 1917, surely the model Trotsky was thinking about, and Lenin too.

He is speculating on the possibility of the capitalist elements *within* the USSR, not outside, the NEPmen and kulaks, creating an alternate, "dual" power aspiring for control over the USSR.

-M.H.-
Yes that is correct

[Red Storm]

Thank you both for the info. I read the link you gave (Daft Punk) on the eleventh congress too. That also helped to put it in it's proper context as well. That is the first time I had read any of the congress minutes or what have you. It explains the measures that were taken quite well and allows one to see how Lenin was in the leadership role.


Not to get off topic but one quick question
@A Marxist Historian... Do you have a particular account on the history of the CCCP that you prefer? One that is not tainted by propaganda and covers the entire period of Soviet history socially and governmentally?

[A Marxist Historian]

Thank you both for the info. I read the link you gave (Daft Punk) on the eleventh congress too. That also helped to put it in it's proper context as well. That is the first time I had read any of the congress minutes or what have you. It explains the measures that were taken quite well and allows one to see how Lenin was in the leadership role.


Not to get off topic but one quick question
@A Marxist Historian... Do you have a particular account on the history of the CCCP that you prefer? One that is not tainted by propaganda and covers the entire period of Soviet history socially and governmentally?

Well, there is no such thing as pure objectivity, everyone has a point of view, you have to read different POVs and judge for yourself.

However, the historian of the Soviet Union who tried hardest for something resembling pure objectivity was the late E.H. Carr. His multi-volume history of the USSR is excellent, and a foundation for all subsequent study of Soviet history.

He died at around volume 11, around about 1930 or so, and his series has since been continued first by Robert Davies and most recently by Wheatcroft. The most recent book in the series by Wheatcroft that I've read, on the famine crisis, The Years of Hunger, continues this excellent tradition.

I think it's stopped there more or less however. But taking you up to 1933 gives you all the contours of the most important period in Soviet history. Since 1933 it's all been downhill anyway, and makes less and less pleasant reading as the years go by. Especially the Great Terror of course.

You do have various textbooks of Soviet history of varying qualities. I'm satisfied by none of them.

Ronald Suny's "The Soviet Experiment" is less bad than most of the others, but one must remember when reading it that Suny is a partisan of the Mensheviks. So it's mostly pretty good--except when talking about the Mensheviks, especially the Georgian Mensheviks, the Caucasus being Suny's particular field of expertise.

The best single book on the Soviet Union, in my opinion, is still Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed. Quite popular with contemporary Russian readers by the way, now that it's no longer illegal.

-M.H.-

[Red Storm]

Well, there is no such thing as pure objectivity, everyone has a point of view, you have to read different POVs and judge for yourself.

However, the historian of the Soviet Union who tried hardest for something resembling pure objectivity was the late E.H. Carr. His multi-volume history of the USSR is excellent, and a foundation for all subsequent study of Soviet history.

He died at around volume 11, around about 1930 or so, and his series has since been continued first by Robert Davies and most recently by Wheatcroft. The most recent book in the series by Wheatcroft that I've read, on the famine crisis, The Years of Hunger, continues this excellent tradition.

I think it's stopped there more or less however. But taking you up to 1933 gives you all the contours of the most important period in Soviet history. Since 1933 it's all been downhill anyway, and makes less and less pleasant reading as the years go by. Especially the Great Terror of course.

You do have various textbooks of Soviet history of varying qualities. I'm satisfied by none of them.

Ronald Suny's "The Soviet Experiment" is less bad than most of the others, but one must remember when reading it that Suny is a partisan of the Mensheviks. So it's mostly pretty good--except when talking about the Mensheviks, especially the Georgian Mensheviks, the Caucasus being Suny's particular field of expertise.

The best single book on the Soviet Union, in my opinion, is still Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed. Quite popular with contemporary Russian readers by the way, now that it's no longer illegal.

-M.H.-
Objective analysis is a difficult thing indeed and I appreciate your point on that note. However you answered my query quite well. These are the kind of books I am interested in my friend, because the historical narrarative that I am familiar with is the western, very biased, version. I am looking to read more by Marxist authors to sift through it all.

Ironically, it is the great terror that interests me, more than many traditional topics you see discussed. I think that is a unpleasant era that is shrouded in modern myth and it is unfortunate. There are far too many angles and too many reasons to blame Stalin on all of the various sides.

I am no Stalinist! I only think he has become a conveinient scapegoat for all of the 'unpleasant' aspects of the early turbulent years of USSR history. I just think there is a hidden truth there that may never be reached because there are too many people who have vested reasons to keep it just the way it is now. My experience in life tells me that when men, or women, are demonized to that extent, to the point of being mere charicatures, there is something there worth investigating. Nothing in this world is as simple as black and white. Then again this requires more study and research.

Thanks for the information and I appreciate the time.

[A Marxist Historian]

Objective analysis is a difficult thing indeed and I appreciate your point on that note. However you answered my query quite well. These are the kind of books I am interested in my friend, because the historical narrarative that I am familiar with is the western, very biased, version. I am looking to read more by Marxist authors to sift through it all.

Ironically, it is the great terror that interests me, more than many traditional topics you see discussed. I think that is a unpleasant era that is shrouded in modern myth and it is unfortunate. There are far too many angles and too many reasons to blame Stalin on all of the various sides.

I am no Stalinist! I only think he has become a conveinient scapegoat for all of the 'unpleasant' aspects of the early turbulent years of USSR history. I just think there is a hidden truth there that may never be reached because there are too many people who have vested reasons to keep it just the way it is now. My experience in life tells me that when men, or women, are demonized to that extent, to the point of being mere charicatures, there is something there worth investigating. Nothing in this world is as simple as black and white. Then again this requires more study and research.

Thanks for the information and I appreciate the time.

On the Great Terror, Oleg Khlevniuk is the great expert, he has written several books and innumerable articles that have been translated into English, and he too tries very hard to be objective. All his stuff is very much worth reading.

Under Gorbachev, he edited the main Soviet historical journal. He is no longer a Marxist I don't think, but his studies when he was a Marxist have left strong roots in his analyses. A very talented historian.

-M.H.-

[daft punk]

Objective analysis is a difficult thing indeed and I appreciate your point on that note. However you answered my query quite well. These are the kind of books I am interested in my friend, because the historical narrarative that I am familiar with is the western, very biased, version. I am looking to read more by Marxist authors to sift through it all.

Ironically, it is the great terror that interests me, more than many traditional topics you see discussed. I think that is a unpleasant era that is shrouded in modern myth and it is unfortunate. There are far too many angles and too many reasons to blame Stalin on all of the various sides.

I am no Stalinist! I only think he has become a conveinient scapegoat for all of the 'unpleasant' aspects of the early turbulent years of USSR history. I just think there is a hidden truth there that may never be reached because there are too many people who have vested reasons to keep it just the way it is now. My experience in life tells me that when men, or women, are demonized to that extent, to the point of being mere charicatures, there is something there worth investigating. Nothing in this world is as simple as black and white. Then again this requires more study and research.

Thanks for the information and I appreciate the time.

Sorry to disappoint you, but if anything the bourgeois propaganda actually underestimates how terrible the purge was. Ok so they sometimes say the famine was deliberate, and that is not proven, but they omit the hundreds of thousand expelled from the CP, the slaughter of 10,000 Trotskyists, the best socialists, the murder of all the old Bolshevik Central Committee bar two.

You wanna read the two books by Vadim Rogovin on these years, he was a leading Russian historian and a Marxist, with access to the archives.

Have a quick look at this short article

http://www.permanentrevolution.net/entry/1009

It is an account by a Marxist who risked his life defending the USSR of life in Russia as the purges loomed.


see also

History: Stalin’s Terror of 1937-1938: Political Genocide in the USSR — Review of New Book by Russian Historian Vadim Z. Rogovin (Mehring Books)

http://socialistalternative.org/news/article20.php?id=1210

"Truth about Great Purges
The Great Purges and trials unfolded roughly from July 1936 to the end of 1938. Not to this day has the ‘entire truth’ about them been published because, as Rogovin writes, this “threatened to undermine the post-Stalin political regime”."

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51Cs8bZp1wL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

you can read bits on google books

[A Marxist Historian]

Sorry to disappoint you, but if anything the bourgeois propaganda actually underestimates how terrible the purge was. Ok so they sometimes say the famine was deliberate, and that is not proven, but they omit the hundreds of thousand expelled from the CP, the slaughter of 10,000 Trotskyists, the best socialists, the murder of all the old Bolshevik Central Committee bar two.

You wanna read the two books by Vadim Rogovin on these years, he was a leading Russian historian and a Marxist, with access to the archives.

Have a quick look at this short article

http://www.permanentrevolution.net/entry/1009

It is an account by a Marxist who risked his life defending the USSR of life in Russia as the purges loomed.


see also

History: Stalin’s Terror of 1937-1938: Political Genocide in the USSR — Review of New Book by Russian Historian Vadim Z. Rogovin (Mehring Books)

http://socialistalternative.org/news/article20.php?id=1210

"Truth about Great Purges
The Great Purges and trials unfolded roughly from July 1936 to the end of 1938. Not to this day has the ‘entire truth’ about them been published because, as Rogovin writes, this “threatened to undermine the post-Stalin political regime”."

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51Cs8bZp1wL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

you can read bits on google books


Rogovin's books are peculiar. Large swatches of them are quite brilliant, but other large swatches of them are marred by WSWS lkeader David North's conspiracy theory thinking. Thus his last book wastes a lot of pages trying to argue that the whole Trotskyist movement (except for North's political ancestors) were all KGB agents.

And Rogovin pretty much endorses Robert Conquest's "Ukrainian famine genocide" thesis, as well as the old myth about how Kirov was allegedly assassinated by Stalin, which just about all historians recognize now is not true, now that the Soviet archives are open and the evidence can be examined properly.

This kind of conspiracy thinking is not just the influence of North and his WSWS and SEP, but typical for the Soviet intelligentsia dissident movement of the Brezhnev era, which Rogovin was kind of the extreme left wing of. Everything is a dark secret conspiracy, an understandable POV for anybody living in a Stalinist system, but wrong.

And Rogovin was very comfortable with the SEP's opposition to unions, unsurprising for a Soviet dissident intellectual, none of whom were too thrilled about auto workers and steelworkers being better paid than they were under Brezhnev.

Rogovin has an excellent sociological analysis of the background of the Great Terror, very worth reading, though often lifted pretty straight from Trotsky, but he gets his facts wrong about the details of the Great Terror.

-M.H.-

[TrotskistMarx]

Wow, cool article. Thanks a lot for posting it. I think I will go to the link you provided and print it, so I can read it easier and share it with some friends. Like you said it is a very important article. Indeed it seems to me that Leon Trotsky was a lot smarter, had more books in his head than Stalin.


.



http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1927/opposition/cover2.jpg



I think all socialists should read this. Stalinists should so they know what they are attacking, Trots should because it is very useful.

It was Trotsky in 1927, summarising what he thought Stalin was doing wrong, and obviously writing it got him kicked out of the country.

Yet the thing Trotsky wrote in it were all soon proved true.

It would be interesting to hear some views of people who have read it, here is the link and the intro..



http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1927/opposition/index.htm

Platform of the Joint Opposition

1927

Chapter 1
Introductory


IN HIS speech at the last party congress he attended, Lenin said:
Here we have lived a year, with the state in our hands, and under the New Economic Policy has it operated our way? No. We don’t like to acknowledge this, but it hasn’t. And how has it operated? The machine isn’t going where we guide it, but where some illegal, or lawless, or God-knows-whence-derived speculators or private capitalistic businessmen, or both together, are guiding it. A machine doesn’t always travel just exactly the way, and it often travels just exactly not the way, that the man imagines who sits at the wheel.
In those words was given the criterion by which we ought to judge the fundamental problems of our politics. In what direction is the machine travelling? The State? The power? Is it travelling in the direction that we, Communists, expressing the interests and will of the workers and the enormous mass of the peasants, desire? Or not in that direction? Or “not exactly” in that direction?
In these years since the death of Lenin, we have more than once tried to bring the attention of the central organs of our party, and afterward the party as a whole, to the fact that, thanks to incorrect leadership, the danger indicated by Lenin has greatly increased. The machine is not going in the direction demanded by the interests of the workers and peasants. On the eve of the new congress we consider it our duty, notwithstanding all the persecution we are suffering, to call the party’s attention with redoubled energy to this fact. For we are sure that the situation can be corrected, and corrected by the party itself.
When Lenin said that the machine often goes where it is directed by forces hostile to us, he called our attention to two facts of supreme importance. First, that there exist in our society these forces hostile to our cause – the kulak, the Nepman, the bureaucrat – availing themselves of our backwardness and our political mistakes, and relying upon the support of international capitalism. Second, the fact that these forces are so strong that they can push our governmental and economic machine in the wrong direction, and ultimately even attempt – at first in a concealed manner – to seize the wheel of the machine.
Lenin’s words laid upon us all the following obligations:


To watch vigilantly the growth of these hostile forces – kulak, Nepman, and bureaucrat;
To remember that in proportion to the general revival of the country, these forces will strive to unite, introduce their own amendments’ into our plans, exercise an increasing pressure upon our policy, and satisfy their interests through our apparatus;
To take all possible measures to weaken the growth, unity, and pressure of these hostile forces, preventing them from creating that actual, although invisible, dual-power system toward which they aspire;
To tell candidly the whole truth about these processes to all the toiling masses. In this now consists the fundamental problem as to a “Thermidorian” danger and the struggle against it.

Since Lenin uttered his warning, many things have improved with us, but many also have grown worse. The influence of the state apparatus is growing, but with it also the bureaucratic distortion of the workers’ state. The absolute and relative growth of capitalism in the country and its absolute growth in the cities are beginning to produce a political self-consciousness in the bourgeois elements of our country. These elements are trying to demoralize – not always unsuccessfully – that part of the Communists with whom they come in contact at work and in social intercourse. The slogan given by Stalin at the Fourteenth Party Congress, “Fire to the left!” could not but promote this union of the right elements in the party with the bourgeois Ustrialov elements in the country.
The question, “Who will beat whom?” will be decided in a continuous struggle of classes on all sectors of the economic, political, and cultural fronts – a struggle for a socialist or a capitalist course of development, for a distribution of the national income corresponding to one or the other of these two courses, for a solid political power of the proletariat or a division of this power with the new bourgeoisie. In a country with an overwhelming majority of small and very small peasants, and small proprietors in general, the most important processes of this struggle will frequently go on in a fragmentary and underground manner, only to burst “unexpectedly” to the surface all at once.
The capitalist element finds its primary expression in a class differentiation in the country, and in a multiplication of private traders in the city. The upper levels in the country and the bourgeois elements in the city are interweaving themselves more and more closely with the various links of our state-economic apparatus. And this apparatus not infrequently helps the new bourgeoisie to wrap up in a statistical fog its successful effort to increase its share in the national income.
The trade apparatus – state, co-operative, and private – devours an enormous share of our national income, more than one-tenth of the gross production. Furthermore, private capital, in its capacity as commercial middleman, has handled in recent years considerably more than a fifth of all trade – in absolute figures, more than five milliards a year. Up to now, the general consumer has received more than 50 per cent of the products he needs from the hands of the private capitalists. For the private capitalist this is the fundamental source of profit and accumulation. The disparity (scissors’) between agricultural and industrial prices, between wholesale and retail prices, the rupture between prices in the different branches of agriculture in the different regions and seasons, and finally the difference between domestic and world prices (contraband), are a constant source of private gain.
Private capital is collecting usurious interest on loans and is making money on government bonds.
The role of the private capitalist in industry is also very considerable. Even though it has decreased relatively in the recent period, still it has grown absolutely. Registered private capitalistic industry shows a gross production of 400 millions a year. Small, home, and handicraft industries show more than 1,800 millions. Altogether, the production of the non-state industries constitutes more than a fifth of the whole production of goods, and about 40 per cent of the commodities in the general market. The overwhelming bulk of this industry is bound up one way or another with private capital. The various open or concealed forms of exploitation of the mass of handicraft workers by commercial and home-enterprise capital are an extremely important and, moreover, a growing source of accumulation for the new bourgeoisie.
Taxes, wages, prices, and credit are the chief instruments of distribution of the national income, strengthening certain classes and weakening others.
The agricultural tax in the country is imposed, as a general rule, in an inverse progression: heavily upon the poor, more lightly upon the economically strong and upon the kulaks. According to approximate calculations, 34 per cent of the poor peasant proprietors of the Soviet Union (even omitting provinces with a highly developed class differentiation, such as the Ukraine, Northern Caucasus, and Siberia) receive 18 per cent of the net income. Exactly the same total income, 18 per cent, is received by the highest group, constituting only 7.5 per cent of the proprietors. Yet both these groups pay approximately the same amount, 20 per cenf each of the total tax. It is evident from this that on each individual poor farm the tax lays a much heavier burden than on the kulak, or the “well-to-do’ proprietor in general. Contrary to the fears of the leaders of the Fourteenth Congress, our tax-policy by no means strips’ the kulak. It does not hinder him in the least from concentrating in his hands a continually greater accumulation in money and kind.
The role of the indirect taxes in our budget is growing alarmingly at the expense of the direct. By that alone the tax-burden automatically shifts from the wealthier to the poorer levels. The taxation of the workers in 1925-1926 was twice as high as in the preceding year, while the taxation of the rest of the urban population diminished by 6 per cent. [1] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1927/opposition/ch01.htm#n1) The liquor tax falls, with more and more unbearable heaviness, precisely upon the industrial regions. The growth of income per person for 1926 as compared with 1925 – according to certain approximate calculations – constituted, for the peasants, 19 per cent; for the workers, 26 per cent; for the merchants and the industrialists, 46 per cent. If you divide the “peasants’ into three fundamental groups, it will appear beyond a doubt that the income of the kulak increased incomparably more than that of the worker. The income of the merchants and industrialists, calculated on the basis of the tax data, is undoubtedly represented as less than it is. However, even these somewhat coloured figures clearly testify to a growth of class differences.
The “scissors”, representing the disparity of agricultural and industrial prices, have drawn still farther apart during the last year and a half. The peasant received for his produce not more than one and a quarter times the pre-war price, and he paid for industrial products not less than two and one-fifth times as much as before the war. This over-payment by the peasants, and again predominantly by the lower level of the peasants, constituting in the past year a sum of about a milliard rubles, not only increases the conflict between agriculture and industry, but greatly sharpens the differentiation in the country.
On the disparity between wholesale and retail prices, the state industry loses, and also the consumer, which means that there is a third party who gains. It is the private capitalist who gains, and consequently capitalism.
Real wages in 1927 stand, at the best, at the same level as in the autumn of 1925. Yet it is indubitable that during the two years intervening the country has grown richer, the total national income has increased, the kulak levels in the country have increased their reserves with enormous rapidity, and the accumulations of the private capitalist, the merchant, the speculator have grown by leaps and bounds. It is clear that the share of the working class in the total income of the country has fallen, while the share of other classes has grown. This fact is of supreme importance in appraising our whole situation.
Only a person who believes at the bottom of his heart that our working class and our party are not able to cope with the difficulties and dangers can affirm that a frank indication of these contradictions in our development, and of the growth of these hostile forces, is panic or pessimism. We do not accept this view. It is necessary to see the dangers clearly. We point them out accurately, precisely in order to struggle with them more effectively and to overcome them.
A certain growth of the hostile forces, the kulak, the Nepman, and the bureaucrat, is unavoidable under the New Economic Policy. You cannot destroy these forces by mere administrative order or by simple economic pressure. In introducing the NEP and carrying it through, we ourselves created a certain place for capitalistic relations in our country, and for a considerable time to come we still have to recognize them as inevitable. Lenin merely reminded us of a naked truth which the workers have to know, when he said:
While we continue to be a small peasant country, there is a more solid basis for capitalism in Russia than for communism. That we must remember ... We have not torn out capitalism by the roots, and we have not undermined the foundation and basis of the internal enemy. [2] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1927/opposition/ch01.htm#n2)
The supremely important social fact here indicated by Lenin cannot, as we said, be simply destroyed, but we can overcome it by way of a correct, planned and systematic working-class policy, relying upon the peasant poor and an alliance with the middle peasant. This policy basically consists in an all.round strengthening of all the social positions of the proletariat, in the swiftest possible elevation of the commanding centres of socialism, in closest possible connexion with the preparation and development of the world proletarian revolution.
A correct Leninist policy also includes manoeuvring. In struggling against the forces of capitalism, Lenin often employed a method of partial concession in order to outflank the enemy, temporary retreat in order afterwards to move forward more successfully. Manoeuvring is also necessary now. But in dodging and manoeuvring against an enemy that could not be overthrown by direct attack, Lenin invariably remained upon the line of the proletarian revolution. Under him the party always knew the causes of each manoeuvre, its meaning, its limits, the line beyond which it ought not to go, and the position at which the proletarian advance should begin again. In those days, under Lenin, a retreat was called a retreat – a concession, a concession. Thanks to that, the manoeuvring proletarian army always preserved its unity, its fighting spirit, its clear consciousness of the goal.
In the recent period there has been a decisive departure on the part of leaders from these Leninist ways. The Stalin group is leading the party blindfold. Concealing the forces of the enemy, creating everywhere and in everything an official appearance of success, this group gives the proletariat no prospect – or, what is worse, a wrong prospect. It moves in zigzags, accommodating itself to and ingratiating itself with hostile elements. It weakens and confuses the forces of the proletarian army. It promotes the growth of passivity, distrust of the leadership and lack of confidence in the forces of the revolution. It disguises, with references to Leninist manoeuvring, an unprincipled jumping from one side to the other, always unexpected by the party, incomprehensible to it, weakening its strength. The only result is that the enemy, having gained time, moves forward. The “classical’ examples of this kind of manoeuvre on the part of Stalin, Bukharin and Rykov, are their Chinese policy and their policy with the Anglo-Russian Committee, on the international field, and within the country, their policy towards the kulak. On all these questions, the party and the working class found out the truth, or a part of the truth, only after the heavy consequences of a policy that was false to the bottom had crashed over their heads.
At the end of these two years in which the Stalin group has really determined the policies of the central institutions of our party, we may consider it fully proven that this group has been powerless to prevent:


An immoderate growth of those forces which desire to turn the development of our country into capitalistic channels;
a weakening of the position of the working class and the poorest peasants against the growing strength of the kulak, the Nepman, and the bureaucrat;
a weakening of the general position of the workers’ state in the struggle with world capitalism, a worsening of the international position of the Soviet Union.

The direct guilt of the Stalin group is that instead of telling the party, the working class, and the peasants the whole truth about the situation, it has concealed the facts, minimised the growth of the hostile forces, and shut the mouths of those who demanded the truth and laid it bare.
The concentration of fire to the left, at a time when the whole situation indicates danger on the right, the crudely mechanical suppression of every criticism expressing the legitimate alarm of the proletariat for the fate of the proletarian revolution, the outright connivance in every deviation to the right, the sapping of the influence of the proletarian and old-Bolshevik nucleus of the party – all these things are weakening and disarming the working class at a moment which demands above all activity of the proletariat, vigilance and unity of the party, faithfulness to its real inheritance of Leninism.
The party leaders distort Lenin, improve upon him, explain him, supplement him, according as it is necessary to conceal each successive mistake that they make. Since Lenin’s death a whole series of new theories has been invented, whose meaning is solely this: that they give theoretical justification to the departure of the Stalin group from the course of the international proletarian revolution. The Mensheviks, the Smienaviekhovtsy and finally the capitalistic press see and welcome in the policies and new theories of Stalin-Bukharin-Martynov a movement “forward from Lenin” (Ustrialov), “statesmanlike wisdom”, “realism”, a renunciation of the “utopias” of revolutionary Bolshevism. In the cutting off from party leadership of a number of Bolsheviks – Lenin’s comrades in arms – they see and openly welcome a practical step towards changing the fundamental course of the party.
Meanwhile the elemental processes of the NEP, not restrained and directed by a firm class policy, are preparing further dangers of the same kind.
Twenty-five million small farms constitute the fundamental source of the capitalist tendencies in Russia. The kulak stratum, gradually emerging from this mass, is realizing the process of primitive accumulation of capital, digging a deep mine under the socialist position. The further destiny of this process depends ultimately upon the relation between the growth of the State economy and the private. The falling behind of our industry vastly increases the tempo of class-differentiation among the peasants and the political dangers arising from it.
Lenin wrote:
In the history of other countries the kulaks have more than once restored the power to landlords, Tsars, priests and capitalists. It has been so in all previous European revolutions, where, in consequence of the weakness of the workers, the kulaks have succeeded in reverting from a republic to monarchy, from the rulership of the toiling masses to the omnipotence of the exploiters, the rich, the parasites.
You can reconcile the kulak with the landlord, the Tsar, and the priest easily enough, even though they’ve had a quarrel, but with the working class, never. [3] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1927/opposition/ch01.htm#n3)
Whoever fails to understand this, whoever believes in “the kulak’s growing into socialism’, is good for just one thing – to run the revolution aground.
There exist in this country two mutually exclusive fundamental positions. One, the position of the proletariat building socialism, the other, the position of the bourgeoisie aspiring to switch our development on to capitalist lines.
The camp of the bourgeoisie and those layers of the petty bourgeoisie who trail after it are placing all their hopes upon the private initiative and the personal interest of the commodity producer. This camp is staking its play on the “economically strong’ peasant, aiming to make the co-operatives, industry and our foreign trade serve this peasant’s interest. This camp believes that socialist industry ought not to count upon the state budget, that its development ought not to be rapid enough to injure the interest of accumulation by the farmer capitalist. The struggle for an increased productivity of labour means to the daily consolidating petty bourgeois putting pressure on the muscles and nerves of the workers. The struggle for lower prices means to him a cutting down of the accumulation of the socialist industries in the interest of commercial capital. The struggle with bureaucratism means to him the dissipation of industry, the weakening of the planning centres. It means the pushing into the background of the heavy industries – that is, again, an adjustment in favour of the economically strong peasant, with the near prospect of an abandonment of the monopoly of foreign trade. This is the course of the Ustrialovs. The name of this course is capitalism on the instalment plan. It is a strong tendency in our country, and exercises an influence upon certain circles of our party.
The proletarian course was described by Lenin in the follow-words:
We can consider the victory of socialism over capitalism, and its permanence, guaranteed, only when the proletarian state power, having conclusively suppressed the resistance of the exploiters and assured itself of their complete subjection and its own complete stability and authority, reorganizes the whole of industry on the basis of large-scale collective production and the latest technique (based on electrification of the entire economy). Only this will make possible such a far-reaching technical and social assistance rendered by the cities to the backward and undifferentiated country as will create the material basis for an immense increase of the productiveness of agricultural and rural labour, impelling the small peasants, by the strength of example and their own interest, to pass over to large-scale, collective, mechanized agriculture. [4] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1927/opposition/ch01.htm#n4)
The whole policy of our party ought to be built up upon this principle – budget, taxes, industry, agriculture, domestic and foreign trade, everything. That is the fundamental stand of the Opposition. That’s the road to socialism.
Between those two positions – every day drawing nearer to the first – the Stalinists are tracing a line consisting of short zigzags to the left and deep ones to the right. The Leninist course is a socialist development of the productive forces in course is a development of the productive forces on a capitalist continual struggle with the capitalist element. The Ustrialov course is a development of the productive forces on a capitalist basis by way of a gradual eating away of the conquests of October. The Stalin course leads, in objective reality, to a delaying of the development of the productive forces, to a lowering of the relative weight of the socialist element, and thus prepares for the final victory of the Ustrialov course. The Stalin course is the more dangerous and ruinous, in that it conceals a real deviation under the mask of familiar words and phrases. The completion of our restoration process has brought forward the whole fundamental question of our economic development and thus has undermined the position of Stalin, which is completely inadequate to meet great problems – whether the revolution in China or the reconstruction of basic capital in the Soviet Union.
Notwithstanding the tension of the situation, heightened in the extreme by the crude mistakes of the present leadership, matters can be put right. But it is necessary to change the line of the party leadership, and change it sharply, in the direction indicated by Lenin.

[daft punk]

Rogovin's books are peculiar. Large swatches of them are quite brilliant, but other large swatches of them are marred by WSWS lkeader David North's conspiracy theory thinking. Thus his last book wastes a lot of pages trying to argue that the whole Trotskyist movement (except for North's political ancestors) were all KGB agents.


I find this hard to believe, the CWI endorses the book. There were a few KGB in the Trotskyist organisation, but they were a few spies, hardly the whole movement. They made false confessions to tarnish Trotskyism, thinking they were sorted, but were executed to keep them quiet.

Who do you think killed Kirov?


Wow, cool article. Thanks a lot for posting it. I think I will go to the link you provided and print it, so I can read it easier and share it with some friends. Like you said it is a very important article. Indeed it seems to me that Leon Trotsky was a lot smarter, had more books in his head than Stalin.


.

Cheers!

[A Marxist Historian]

I find this hard to believe, the CWI endorses the book. There were a few KGB in the Trotskyist organisation, but they were a few spies, hardly the whole movement. They made false confessions to tarnish Trotskyism, thinking they were sorted, but were executed to keep them quiet.

Who do you think killed Kirov?



Cheers!

Now, as to why the CWI endorses the book, well, first of all I don't think they'd endorse his last book, with all the stuff about Joe Hansen as a KGB agent and whatnot. Aside from that, you'll have to ask them. Maybe they just haven't read all his books (I have a bunch of them, I read Russian), and maybe they actually agree with him about the Ukrainian famine, Kirov etc.

It's no secret who killed Kirov. It was a disgruntled Leningrad communist down on his luck named Nikolayev, who was as a personality remarkably similar to Lee Harvey Oswald, the guy who killed JFK.

He as it happens hung out a bit with various Zinovievites and even Trotskyists, which is where Stalin got the idea to blame it all on a conspiracy by Zinoviev and/or Trotsky.

There's a wonderful biography of Kirov by a woman named Alla Kirilina. She's the great world expert on Kirov, having worked at the official Kirov museum for half a century, she knows everything about Kirov worth knowing, and a lot that isn't. Kirov, it turns out, was about as close as Stalin ever came to a trusted personal friend of his. The last guy Stalin would want to kill.

Unfortunately it hasn't been translated into English. But it had a big impact on Western Soviet historians. Since it came out, historians arguing that Stalin killed Kirov have been few and far between.

Here's a link for an article in a historical journal partially based on her book, which explains its significance and gives the reference in its first footnote.

http://src-h.slav.hokudai.ac.jp/publictn/acta/24/lenoe.pdf

-M.H.-

[daft punk]

Now, as to why the CWI endorses the book, well, first of all I don't think they'd endorse his last book, with all the stuff about Joe Hansen as a KGB agent and whatnot.

Which book?




Aside from that, you'll have to ask them. Maybe they just haven't read all his books (I have a bunch of them, I read Russian), and maybe they actually agree with him about the Ukrainian famine, Kirov etc.

It's no secret who killed Kirov. It was a disgruntled Leningrad communist down on his luck named Nikolayev, who was as a personality remarkably similar to Lee Harvey Oswald, the guy who killed JFK.

He as it happens hung out a bit with various Zinovievites and even Trotskyists, which is where Stalin got the idea to blame it all on a conspiracy by Zinoviev and/or Trotsky.

There's a wonderful biography of Kirov by a woman named Alla Kirilina. She's the great world expert on Kirov, having worked at the official Kirov museum for half a century, she knows everything about Kirov worth knowing, and a lot that isn't. Kirov, it turns out, was about as close as Stalin ever came to a trusted personal friend of his. The last guy Stalin would want to kill.

Unfortunately it hasn't been translated into English. But it had a big impact on Western Soviet historians. Since it came out, historians arguing that Stalin killed Kirov have been few and far between.

Here's a link for an article in a historical journal partially based on her book, which explains its significance and gives the reference in its first footnote.

http://src-h.slav.hokudai.ac.jp/publictn/acta/24/lenoe.pdf

-M.H.-
well, whoever killed him, it was Stalin's excuse to start a purge.

[A Marxist Historian]

Which book?



well, whoever killed him, it was Stalin's excuse to start a purge.

Truer words rarely spoke!

The book I'm referring to is actually the next to last in his series of seven books titled "Was there an alternative to Stalinism"? Its title is "World Revolution and World War," covering the post-Great Terror period, the Hitler-Stalin pact etc. Third part, "Trotsky and the Fourth International," is where you have all the David North stuff about how Joe Hansen and half the FI were all NKVD agents. I've translated the titles, as I don't think the book has been translated into English. Which is fine as far as I'm concerned!

However, I don't think he accuses Ted Grant of being an NKVD agent, and I suppose that helps to explain why the CWI would feel comfortable with publishing his stuff.

-M.H.-

[daft punk]

Ted Grant NKVD lol! I can still picture him turning up to meetings, two plastic shopping bags stuffed with notes. Prior to speaking he would be randomly shuffling them, but as soon as he started they were ignored.

I dunno, maybe the CWI are unaware of him saying that. They just reviewed the one called Stalin's terror 1937-8.

why does Rogovin think half the 4th Int were NKVD? It sounds like bullshit. I'm sure there were a few but probably not any leaders.

And why are wsws not part of CWI? They seem very similar. I have only seen wsws get a couple of things wrong. Not studied them much though.

in googlin this I found an article which says North accused Hansen of working for the US government.
http://anti-sep-tic.blogspot.com/2009/08/david-north-joseph-hansens-natural-son.html

all sounds far fetched anyway.

[Red Storm]

Just to clarify what is wsws and CWI?

On the subject of Trotsky and Stalin... I don't really know what to believe or if the truth of these matters will ever be truly known. Did Stalin acknowledge that he ordered an assassination and that his guy did the job? If he did, do we really even know why? It seems more likely that these men were played against each other by outside forces and that they played games using each others name and image to control others around them. In their minds this control was in the interest of the greater good and in there lies the problem. In other words they were two uncompromising men, with many powerful enemies, that had a vested interest to set them against each other, two men who sought to be the messiah of the proletariat and both fell victim to the animal within their person. Now we have to sift through all of this to see the facts.

Realistically we may never know the real situation and both made amazing contributions for different reasons. Both are worthy of study. So why not consider the thoughts of both as valuable and to differing degrees applicable. Do I want to see a Stalin return? Not the one they show on tv and in the history books. Do I think he even remotely resembles that man? No, I do not. Does he resemble the man that Trotsky reveals? He may to a degree, but with Trotsky's motives and ambition I think it is dangerous to side with Trotsky as well. Trotsky makes Stalin harder to know, not easier, because he uses the mind and pen of a skilled propagandist, far too often, for us to see anything clearly. So I take both men with a grain of salt.

I ponder their thoughts and actions equally. I don't want to rule out Stalin or Trotsky because their competition or adversary said this or that. I don't want to rule out the possibility that the leaders of the USSR simply decided to bury all of the unfavorable things that went on in the Stalin years by blaming Stalin AFTER his death. They could clean the slate of history by doing so and this allows a state to cut ties with its painful unpleasant past. So Stalin is far too complex and far too obscured by hindsight and nonsense, on all sides, to even truly understand, know, or comprehend. I suppose my point is do not be so quick to jump to one side or the other, and declare the other side wrong, because it is easy to be wrong with all of these dynamics. That and there is a lot at stake for us as Marxists.

Trotsky is some what of an enigma to me. Just like Stalin is in many ways but for different reasons. I know what conventional history says about him and the roles he played in the revolution. Yet I find his writings very very interesting. He met an unfortunate end and he had some odd friends and acquaintances for a Marxist. Other than that I do not know enough about him yet; if I can even get to know him at all. While all of these points may seem trivial they are important when such emphasis is placed on the words of such people. When such a state of orthodoxy and rigid dogma is forged from the words and decisions of such people. I see a break with Marxism and the development of stagnant polarization. I see scientific socialism devolving into a cult of personality and a new age religion with all that this implies. Yet we do not have to go that route either.

I must thank you Daft Punk for making me read the link in the other thread, written by Trotsky, it has made me begin to unravel that mystery by examining his written work more carefully and closely. I will try to comment on that link in the other thread(SOIC thread) today or tomorrow. Cheers my comrades

[GoddessCleoLover]

The assassination of Trotsky is less of a mystery that it used to be since the publication of the memoirs of Pavel Sudoplatov.

[Red Storm]

What did his memoirs have to say on the subject of the assassination? Does it provide any real proof or just third person accounts, jaded ex-soviets eyewitness testimony, and personal interpretations of the event? Is it more reliable than Mitrokhin author of Sword and Shield that claims to have delivered to MI6 a hand copied version of the actual NKVD/KGB file on Trotsky but never bothers to provide any real legally admissible evidence to support any of his claims?

I am of the opinion that if Stalin wanted Trotsky dead he would never have made it out of the USSR alive in the first place and that all other accounts are speculation or politically unreliable as sources. Being that I am not big on issues of faith, I refrain from basing the whole of my political position behind such flimsy evidence. Unless there is something that I am unaware of, I think Stalin would be found not guilty in any objective trial by law as far as Trotsky goes. In fact I think he would be found not guilty more times than guilty if the case against him could be scrutinized properly.

Now this can be proven or dis-proven by providing indisputable evidence beyond hearsay and questionable eyewitness testimony but that is non existent as far as I know. The motive to blame Stalin is there for all parties involved. Then again I think this has little bearing on the value of his work and the lessons we can learn by studying his successful decisions and failures in their total complete form. That logic is universal but what I see is infighting over which one had it right and a refusal to consider that both sides were right and wrong all at the same time.

That is not constructive. In fact it is counterproductive and will insure the status quo. Most important of all, conditions in the world have changed since 1917, or even 1848, as Marxists we have to continue the existing work and make changes and additions when needed just like Lenin did in his day. If we don't we will be unable to use the gifts of Marx, Lenin, Engels, Ho Chi Minh, Mao, or even Stalin and anyone else that tried to break wage slavery and the imperialist juggernaut.

[GoddessCleoLover]

I would agree that Stalin was not the absolute dictator dispensing death at the time of Trotsky's exile. Even as late as the early 1930s Ryutin was not condemned to death for opposing Stalin, although there are claims that Stalin demanded Ryutin's execution but was overruled by others on the Politburo. OTOH the best historical evidence indicates that by 1936 Stalin did hold the power and life in his hands. The evidence for this are documents from the Soviet archives that contained lists of names of persons to be shot. These documents indicate that on rare occasion Stalin crossed off the names of certain people, this sparing their lives.

On the larger point there are two schools of thought on the efficacy of analyzing Soviet history. I belong to that school of thought that holds that if we are ever going to regain the confidence and support of the working class, we must deal with the negative as well as positive aspects of Soviet history. Certain European Communist parties, the French Communist party in particular for too long failed to confront the realities of Soviet history, and ultimately their mass base defected and the reformist French Socialist party eclipsed the PCF.

[Red Storm]

Certainly. I agree with you on the subject of confronting the demons of the past. It is the only way forward. To ignore this is a mistake. I guess the question is how?

Let me ask you this, what do these documents really tell us? Those documents show us Stalin reviewed these lists and even spared people by adding in written notes and pencil lines. It does not show his reasoning and rationale. It does not show whether these people were guilty or innocent(that were on these lists). Maybe these people did just what Stalin said they did. Or maybe he could not tell the world all about it because it showed the weakness of his regime like Saddam Hussein with WMD threats. Or what if he was doing it for the right reasons but he got it wrong on some cases and people lost their lives(no less a tragedy). Should we hold the nations leader accountable when a conviction is wrong because of the district attorney or a flawed investigation? The NKVD was pretty good at its job but it consisted of human beings. Those secret documents have not been released completely and they may never be, bear in mind that anything and everything was for sale once the party collapsed. Things can easily disappear.

Regardless, I find it odd how involved many of those people were with western Wall street representatives and capitalist financiers. The United States Congress even opened an investigation into Wall St involvement in the revolution and it is ironic how the names from the purges make up the bulk of the Soviet or exile contacts, used by Wall St., the very same people whom the Wall St. financiers dealt with inside and outside of the USSR during and before the revolution. The same men who took money from Jacob Schiff and others in international finance and who were heavily involved with capitalist Wall Street. The same men who were in charge of industry, resources, and economic dealings with the west. Any way you look at it they made strange bedfellows and something is there on that account.

Maybe this is no coincidence and Wall St. sought a state monopoly(centralized planned economy) it could hijack and control from afar and Lenin and Stalin kept them from doing so. They do this every where they go in this world and set up shop. How can we ever know in a time and age where Stalin being the devil is a political necessity to scare people into Capitalist arms and away from Communism or bury the sins of the revolution and collectivization in the case of the communists. Stalin is a easy target and I think it is too difficult to ascertain the true details of what really went on to make a true position. So I don't look at Stalin in the conventional way. It is just to hard to get at the details.

Anyway much of this post is designed to inspire thought and to demonstrate the possibilities. I don't want to discuss Stalin too much because there are far more important issues to discuss. I just want to encourage others to see him outside the current caricature that has been created and consider it as objectively as possible.

[daft punk]

Just to clarify what is wsws and CWI?

CWI is the Trotskyist international which I sympathise with. wsws is the website of another Trot organisation, cant remember the name. I'ts ok for historical stuff but they get some things wrong and Marxist Historian (a revleft member) told me some stuff about them that was dodgy, that they accused loads of Trots of being KGB!




On the subject of Trotsky and Stalin... I don't really know what to believe or if the truth of these matters will ever be truly known. Did Stalin acknowledge that he ordered an assassination and that his guy did the job? If he did, do we really even know why? It seems more likely that these men were played against each other by outside forces and that they played games using each others name and image to control others around them. In their minds this control was in the interest of the greater good and in there lies the problem. In other words they were two uncompromising men, with many powerful enemies, that had a vested interest to set them against each other, two men who sought to be the messiah of the proletariat and both fell victim to the animal within their person. Now we have to sift through all of this to see the facts.

Realistically we may never know the real situation and both made amazing contributions for different reasons. Both are worthy of study. So why not consider the thoughts of both as valuable and to differing degrees applicable. Do I want to see a Stalin return? Not the one they show on tv and in the history books. Do I think he even remotely resembles that man? No, I do not. Does he resemble the man that Trotsky reveals? He may to a degree, but with Trotsky's motives and ambition I think it is dangerous to side with Trotsky as well. Trotsky makes Stalin harder to know, not easier, because he uses the mind and pen of a skilled propagandist, far too often, for us to see anything clearly. So I take both men with a grain of salt.

I ponder their thoughts and actions equally. I don't want to rule out Stalin or Trotsky because their competition or adversary said this or that. I don't want to rule out the possibility that the leaders of the USSR simply decided to bury all of the unfavorable things that went on in the Stalin years by blaming Stalin AFTER his death. They could clean the slate of history by doing so and this allows a state to cut ties with its painful unpleasant past. So Stalin is far too complex and far too obscured by hindsight and nonsense, on all sides, to even truly understand, know, or comprehend. I suppose my point is do not be so quick to jump to one side or the other, and declare the other side wrong, because it is easy to be wrong with all of these dynamics. That and there is a lot at stake for us as Marxists.

Trotsky is some what of an enigma to me. Just like Stalin is in many ways but for different reasons. I know what conventional history says about him and the roles he played in the revolution. Yet I find his writings very very interesting. He met an unfortunate end and he had some odd friends and acquaintances for a Marxist. Other than that I do not know enough about him yet; if I can even get to know him at all. While all of these points may seem trivial they are important when such emphasis is placed on the words of such people. When such a state of orthodoxy and rigid dogma is forged from the words and decisions of such people. I see a break with Marxism and the development of stagnant polarization. I see scientific socialism devolving into a cult of personality and a new age religion with all that this implies. Yet we do not have to go that route either.

I must thank you Daft Punk for making me read the link in the other thread, written by Trotsky, it has made me begin to unravel that mystery by examining his written work more carefully and closely. I will try to comment on that link in the other thread(SOIC thread) today or tomorrow. Cheers my comrades

Trotsky represents Marxism. Stalin represented the degeneration of a revolution into a dictatorship by a privileged elite. The revolution degenerated in the 1920s because it was isolated in a backward country.

Stalin's regime evolved into an anti-socialist one.

It really is that simple. Stalin killed all the socialists in Russia, and at the same time sabotaged the revolution in Spain. When his hitmen returned from Spain he killed most of them. One or two defected to escape death and spoke about it. But millions in Spain witnessed the actions of the Stalinists, disarming the workers militias, forming a government with capitalists, attacking the anarchists and the POUM, calling for a halt to the revolution, banning the POUM and killing their leaders.

[daft punk]

Certainly. I agree with you on the subject of confronting the demons of the past. It is the only way forward. To ignore this is a mistake. I guess the question is how?

Let me ask you this, what do these documents really tell us? Those documents show us Stalin reviewed these lists and even spared people by adding in written notes and pencil lines. It does not show his reasoning and rationale. It does not show whether these people were guilty or innocent(that were on these lists). Maybe these people did just what Stalin said they did. Or maybe he could not tell the world all about it because it showed the weakness of his regime like Saddam Hussein with WMD threats. Or what if he was doing it for the right reasons but he got it wrong on some cases and people lost their lives(no less a tragedy). Should we hold the nations leader accountable when a conviction is wrong because of the district attorney or a flawed investigation? The NKVD was pretty good at its job but it consisted of human beings. Those secret documents have not been released completely and they may never be, bear in mind that anything and everything was for sale once the party collapsed. Things can easily disappear.

Regardless, I find it odd how involved many of those people were with western Wall street representatives and capitalist financiers. The United States Congress even opened an investigation into Wall St involvement in the revolution and it is ironic how the names from the purges make up the bulk of the Soviet or exile contacts, used by Wall St., the very same people whom the Wall St. financiers dealt with inside and outside of the USSR during and before the revolution. The same men who took money from Jacob Schiff and others in international finance and who were heavily involved with capitalist Wall Street. The same men who were in charge of industry, resources, and economic dealings with the west. Any way you look at it they made strange bedfellows and something is there on that account.

Maybe this is no coincidence and Wall St. sought a state monopoly(centralized planned economy) it could hijack and control from afar and Lenin and Stalin kept them from doing so. They do this every where they go in this world and set up shop. How can we ever know in a time and age where Stalin being the devil is a political necessity to scare people into Capitalist arms and away from Communism or bury the sins of the revolution and collectivization in the case of the communists. Stalin is a easy target and I think it is too difficult to ascertain the true details of what really went on to make a true position. So I don't look at Stalin in the conventional way. It is just to hard to get at the details.

Anyway much of this post is designed to inspire thought and to demonstrate the possibilities. I don't want to discuss Stalin too much because there are far more important issues to discuss. I just want to encourage others to see him outside the current caricature that has been created and consider it as objectively as possible.

Stalin didnt just kill Trotsky, he killed most of his children, their husbands and wives, their children, thousands of Trotsky's supporters, their husbands and wives, their children. He even killed the people that killed them, to keep them quiet.

This is all historical fact. It was a political counter-revolution. After that, Stalin's policy was to stop socialism happening anywhere in the world.

Let me give you a simple example. In China Stalin didnt back Mao, he backed the KMT, right up to 1948. The KMT were a capitalist party who murdered tens of thousands of communists, over a million actually. Stalin simply swapped sides when Mao won the civil war.

Could it be any clearer?

Stalin's intention was for Eastern Europe to go capitalist.

As for Jacob Schiff, sounds like conspiracy theory nonsense.

Trotsky was murdered by Stalins agents as he expected. First they raked his house with machine gun fire. Then they stuck an axe in his skull.

Previously they shot his son Sergei, they poisoned his other son, Lev. His daughter Nina died of TB. Stalin had her husband shot and her two children disappeared without trace.

Trotsky's other daughter Zinaida committed suicide suffering from TB and depression. Stalin had let her leave Russia, but had made her choose which of her two children to leave behind! If that is not sadism I dont know what is. Her husband and her previous husband were both shot by Stalin's people. Her daughter Alexandra, who she was forced to leave behind was looked after by her father until he was shot, then by her grandmother. Her grandmother was then sent to labour camps where she perished. Alexandra herself was then exiled to Kazakhstan.

Stalin's violence started in about 1926-7, for instance Trotsky's friend Joffe killed himself after Stalin denied him medical treatment. In his suicide note he urged Trotsky to fight Stalin as hard as he could.

Even Stalin's wife topped herself after seeing her friends disappear one by one.

[Red Storm]

Bare with me my friend because this is going to take several posts to get this all out. Please understand that I am not saying Stalin was right, nor am I saying he was wrong. I am saying he is both at the same time. I am only saying that people are missing the valuable lessons and they are tangled up in the details. I will try to give some examples. I have repeated your text in bold so it ties it together better.

Stalin didnt just kill Trotsky, he killed most of his children, their husbands and wives, their children, thousands of Trotsky's supporters, their husbands and wives, their children. He even killed the people that killed them, to keep them quiet.

For instance can you honestly say Stalin killed them? Even if the facts are there you could at best only say he killed them by proxy. Yet do we even know if Stalin gave an order to kill any of these relatives of Trotsky? It is like saying matter of factually that Khrushchev killed Kennedy. We can establish motive (cold war), we can probably even find records to show plans were made, at some point in time, in a archive, yet can we really tie Oswald to Khrushchev? Could we even take Oswald's testimony seriously if he had had time to testify? We cannot but that doesn't stop anyone from repeating such thoughts, writing about it, or turning such a stated thought into a propaganda myth to meet someone's agenda. It doesn't have to even be done in a propagandist sense, or by a propagandist for that matter, it can be done through a medium or to quote Lenin a "useful idiot" without their knowledge. In fact I think everyone involved was a useful idiot at some point for Capitalism.

All that would be necessary to start the ball rolling is for someone to put the seed into someones ear that is already anti-Khrushchev and they will do the work for the propagandist/agenda. These things go on all the time and it has made history, in general, very very difficult to rely on to establish truth or fact. I am not trying to justify Stalin or champion him in any way I am just playing Devil's advocate at this point comrade. I could do the same to the Stalinists to make the same points about Trotsky. This is about logic and fact not Stalin or Trotsky.

This is all historical fact. It was a political counter-revolution. After that, Stalin's policy was to stop socialism happening anywhere in the world.

I say to you here that facts have to meet certain criteria to be labeled facts and most of these things are not actual facts but interpretation of various facts coupled with humanistic faults. Fact is a word that should be used very very carefully. We know his policy, and to him, he felt it was the way forward. If it fails is it sabotage? I do not think it intentional. I just see a man who did his best, for right or for wrong, to make a state capable of reaching the goals of Marx someday. If he had been right we would have no need for the conversation right?

Let me give you a simple example. In China Stalin didnt back Mao, he backed the KMT, right up to 1948. The KMT were a capitalist party who murdered tens of thousands of communists, over a million actually. Stalin simply swapped sides when Mao won the civil war.

On this I cannot comment. I simply do not know enough about the actual events you are bringing up. I will assume the KMT is Shang Kei Shek's nationalist group. I am not too familair with Chinese history or the history of USSR/PRC/China relations. I will say this though, did you know we(US) supported Lenin, Trotsky, Ho Chi Minh, and Mao? The US did so because at that time it served a purpose. I don't think either one of us would think any of the US officials were Marxists or intended to bring about Socialism by these acts BUT THE ACTS THEMSELVES ARE FACTS. "Politics makes liars of us all" said Ben Franklin and he had a great point. One must not forget that things are not always what they seem and that some things have a deeper meaning just below the surface.

Could it be any clearer?

I think this raises interesting questions that require more research. I don't think this makes it clearer. It should only encourage research and even then it would be difficult if not impossible to find under the circumstances of the day.

Stalin's intention was for Eastern Europe to go capitalist.

How do you establish that? Eastern Bloc/Europe was state capitalist(just like the USSR was during it's entire existence) throughout its existence right? It was typically capitalist post WWI and it changed post WWII. We have not been fortunate enough to see Marxist Communism yet, right? Stalin spread his ideas Westward, and eastward for that matter, for right or for wrong, and he had plans to go all the way to the shores of the Atlantic in France before June 1941 and perhaps until his death. Stalin's problem is similar to Hitlers; they tried to do it all in one day because they sought credit and immortality through history. Lenin had far more understanding and patience yet he only got so far before the reigns were passed on. Had he lived on a little longer we would not be having this conversation either. He died far to soon at far to critical a point.

As for Jacob Schiff, sounds like conspiracy theory nonsense.

But is it? If you only look at the facts that Lenin got money that was arranged through Trotsky via Schiff Kuhn & Loeb amongst the many contributors, then you have concretely established a tie between Capitalism and the foundation of the USSR(Jacob Schiff the anti-czarist in particular). When you consider that the USA was allied to Imperial Russia during WWI you have to wonder why these men were able to gain US visas to re-enter this allied nation in order to fulfill the German General Staff's plan to bounce Russia out of the war. That is betrayal in the finest sense of the term(in regard to Imp. Russia and the entente powers).

That is deep and mind boggling until you remember that they profit immensely under certain circumstances and war is just one of those circumstances, revolution is one, chaotic economy is another, monopoly is the best and these connections are undeniable. The same men helped get Hitler into power as well. This is the secret hand behind history and all history requires inertia. Ironically, at the same time they(the financiers of the revolution) set up the anti-communist movement in the USA to prevent it from spreading across the globe to the USA. These are verifiable facts stripped of the authors interpretation. My interpretation could be wrong but attempt to find a way to explain these verifiable facts in any other way and you will be stumped.

I suggest you read Anthony Sutton's book just to see the factually established connections(and modus operandi of the powers that be) and the way they tried and do try to hijack these revolutions(Libya, Egypt, Syria) for their own benefit and goals. Goals that conflict with those of the revolution. We will face these same issues in the future for sure. If you do decide to read Sutton's books I suggest you consider his agenda as well and do consider that a personal warning. He tries to claim the Marxists in Russia were outright working for Imperialism but I think this is just a bad interpretation of the actual facts. He was a excellent researcher but not so great an analyst. He was a bourgeois pro-capitalist libertarian author but he realized there are things in this world that are stranger than fiction and that they only seem strange on the surface.

Just look at the facts and find your own understanding of them my friend but do not be too hasty in formulating a opinion. The capitalists threw everything they could at the USSR and they used all kinds of people, including true Marxists like Lenin and Trotsky or even Stalin, to try to force the USSR into becoming a manipulable puppet state and in order to establish a exclusive state run monopoly. Lenin reference it by saying we are reacting to the capitalists and not doing anything of their own initiative(see your link on the 11th party congress). Intrigue was the theme of the day and it made Stalin extremely paranoid and perhaps even murderous. This activity caused complete havoc within the USSR.

Trotsky was murdered by Stalins agents as he expected. First they raked his house with machine gun fire. Then they stuck an axe in his skull.

He could have been killed by his agents for sure; or he could have been killed by one, personally motivated, over zealous follower, who took it upon his self to kill Trotsky to save the USSR, in which all power was concentrated in Stalin. It is just that easy to misconstrue a zealot as a agent especially when the press organs of the Capitalist world or even their courts are pounding that out to that very world. This is the kernel of what I am saying, the picture is far too cloudy to get hung up on and decide to throw all other ideas to the wind. Such assumptions are really unverifiable and Stalin and the lessons he passed on to us by chance are far too important to ignore because you believe one man was wrong and one man was right. Things are never that simple in life and we must take the good with the bad, especially when the details are this difficult to ascertain.

Previously they shot his son Sergei, they poisoned his other son, Lev. His daughter Nina died of TB. Stalin had her husband shot and her two children disappeared without trace.

Someone shot and poisoned them but do we really know for sure who gave the order or why? Could it have been followers who thought they were saving the revolution just as easily? Could it be that the Capitalists seized the opportunity to control the facts and the perception that was passed on to the world? Why would they not seize this opportunity? It could be that this is the case just as easily at times and this is just the nature of propaganda and politics. The same tactics are used all the time to discredit and blame the enemy for a murder you helped to facilitate or that you actually made happen. These things make the truth elusive, not clearer, so why indulge in it? Why not say Stalin and Trotsky must both be studied and analyzed equally and evenly. With equal scrutiny.

Trotsky's other daughter Zinaida committed suicide suffering from TB and depression. Stalin had let her leave Russia, but had made her choose which of her two children to leave behind! If that is not sadism I dont know what is. Her husband and her previous husband were both shot by Stalin's people. Her daughter Alexandra, who she was forced to leave behind was looked after by her father until he was shot, then by her grandmother. Her grandmother was then sent to labour camps where she perished. Alexandra herself was then exiled to Kazakhstan.

Stalin's violence started in about 1926-7, for instance Trotsky's friend Joffe killed himself after Stalin denied him medical treatment. In his suicide note he urged Trotsky to fight Stalin as hard as he could.

Even Stalin's wife topped herself after seeing her friends disappear one by one.

I grouped these last three together but I could have added them in above. These events all happened but the details again come from Trotsky or other enemies of Stalin. How are we to know if Trotsky's kids were smuggling letters and messages for the exiled 'enemy of the people' Trotsky or if they did far worse in the eyes of Stalin or even more importantly in the eyes of his followers. I used the words in parenthesis to show the mood of the time. The mood of the time would have made a person who was caught smuggling communiques from a resistance cell into the USSR an enemy of the state and it would have been seen as a crime against the people. Stalin didn't give preferential treatment to his own son when the Germans captured him so how many mistakes do you think he would allow before he had to act even against former comrades? Especially when he, just like Trotsky, swore he was the only one who could save and create Socialism. This was a battle of egos as much as a battle of polemics and the ego obscures reality.

The reality is, though it is just one of many, that many evil things were done in his name just like the wrongs done in the name of Christ. We must extricate all of these realities to truly see a clearer picture. Then there are many more things that are wrongly attributed to Stalin. My point in ALL of this is that we simply cannot know so we shouldn't get so hung up, or gridlocked as Marxists, on unverifiable tidbits that obscure the bigger picture. The picture that shows what we must do in the future using all of the resources, no matter the source(s), to solve the problems before us. If that isn't in the spirit of Marx or even Trotsky; I would have to say that I am in the wrong forum. Simply said, we need to stay out of the political minefields laid by the personalities of the day and look at it more objectively and free of personality and human shortcomings that are there for all to see and on all sides. Once we get through that we can get to the crux of the matter and that is the realization of true Socialism.

[GoddessCleoLover]

The realization of true socialism, or any socialism for that matter, requires the establishment of the DoP, or since I prefer more updated language, working class rule or workers' democracy. If we look honestly and realistically at Soviet history, IMO the conclusion we must draw is that workers' democracy never took hold there. Two major factors were clearly the material conditions of the time, immediately following the October Revolution there were three years of civil war in which military exigencies were paramount The second being the failure of the revolution to spread westward due to the failure of the Hungarian soviet, and the fact that at least two attempts to bring social revolution to Germany were crushed by the German army, and finally the defeat of the Soviet army on the banks of the Vistula.

In addition to these adverse material conditions, the majority of the Bolshevik leaders including Lenin, Stalin,Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Bukharin decided to quash dissent within the RCP (b) and institute other measures that created a one-party dictatorship over the working class. Stalin as the eventual dictator was merely the culmination of a process of centralization of power that was predicted quite accurately by Rosa Luxemburg. The reason why it is vitally important to revisit this history is that the working class is generally aware that something went dreadfully wrong in the Soviet Union and expects revolutionaries to be forthright in criticising dictatorial policies. In short, we have to present a vision of the revolution and workers' democracy where workers will indeed rule as a class, rather than be ruled over by a party or a dictator.

[Red Storm]

Dammit I lost my post. Why doesn't the forum keep you logged in for more than a minute unless you are surfing page to page. That is the fourth post I lost on this forum. It was long too. Oh well. I will attempt to rewrite it later. Sorry Daft Punk I had a response to the post two posts back but I lost it before I could copy and paste it back into the quick reply.

[Red Storm]

The realization of true socialism, or any socialism for that matter, requires the establishment of the DoP, or since I prefer more updated language, working class rule or workers' democracy. If we look honestly and realistically at Soviet history, IMO the conclusion we must draw is that workers' democracy never took hold there. Two major factors were clearly the material conditions of the time, immediately following the October Revolution there were three years of civil war in which military exigencies were paramount The second being the failure of the revolution to spread westward due to the failure of the Hungarian soviet, and the fact that at least two attempts to bring social revolution to Germany were crushed by the German army, and finally the defeat of the Soviet army on the banks of the Vistula.

In addition to these adverse material conditions, the majority of the Bolshevik leaders including Lenin, Stalin,Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Bukharin decided to quash dissent within the RCP (b) and institute other measures that created a one-party dictatorship over the working class. Stalin as the eventual dictator was merely the culmination of a process of centralization of power that was predicted quite accurately by Rosa Luxemburg. The reason why it is vitally important to revisit this history is that the working class is generally aware that something went dreadfully wrong in the Soviet Union and expects revolutionaries to be forthright in criticising dictatorial policies. In short, we have to present a vision of the revolution and workers' democracy where workers will indeed rule as a class, rather than be ruled over by a party or a dictator.
You have just covered the history to a lot of what I just attempted to cover in my 'lost' post. I used a different way to demonstrate it but you hit the nail right on the head. A lot of the problem with the modern day Marxists is that they join factions that prefer one flavor of Soviet leader over the other. This ends in mimicry of old habits and methods and people are scared of just that. A repeat of the old ideas.

Just as GG put it above; no one has seen true socialism so there should be no comparison between the USSR and actual Communism. Zero... none! There should be no argument or debate on this. This is true and it is better than subscribing to one particular tiny flavor of failed revolutionary Marxists, all the while telling the other Marxist, his hero or flavor failed and then arguing the supremacy of their guys personal ideas. This gets us no where. We have to draw all the lessons we can, as objectively as we can, so we can get beyond this stage and on to better things. If not we make it easier on our enemies to strangle the life out of us.

Trotsky became the way or method a lot of Marxists could say, just what Gramsci Guy just said what I attempted to as well, that this USSR is not our idea of Marxism. Trotsky fed on that and Stalin sought to suppress it inside and outside the USSR. Had Trotsky gained power it may have been just a switch of faces and names but the argument would remain in many ways. It still would have amounted to, "the culmination of a process of centralization of power" as Gramsci Guy put it,and it still necessitated a state at that time in history.

We have to come up with new ideas and answers to those problems, answers anchored in the spirit of Marx and Engels, that the great revolutionaries faced, and without any exceptions or limitations. We cannot engage in the suppression of contrary ideas and thoughts just because they are contrary to our own ideas of right and wrong. Dissent is necessary, be it Stalinist or Trotskyite, when so much is at stake. The American bourgeois revolution embraced dissent while the Soviet one forbade it. We just need to iron out the wrinkles a bit before we are provided with a new chance at shaping history.

This is perhaps the greatest failing of the revolution. Dissent was forbidden on a proper scale to propel the movement truly forward. It started with the RSDLP splitting up and exponentially increased until the end. Now we are left with the mess to clean up. We aren't going to win any large numbers over by simply claiming 'if only Stalin had been removed from the CC, and Trotsky named in his place, it all would have worked out for us', if for no other reason that this is not a accurate depiction of the events. It is far more complicated than that and a casual glance tells us so. That was Khrushchev and Trotsky's strategy but that failed too and for obvious reasons.

Yet we see these patterns and strategies repeated over and over again. It is no surprise they decided to suppress dissent when they took so much time to secure it's very existence by the very tactics they used politically before the revolution. Look at the dynamics of the forum and you will find a perfect example of history repeating itself complete with the verbatim of the day. There is no time like now to start seeing and acting on these subjects differently. Then we can find unity and begin to truly organize against Capitalism.

[daft punk]

Stalin didnt just kill Trotsky, he killed most of his children, their husbands and wives, their children, thousands of Trotsky's supporters, their husbands and wives, their children. He even killed the people that killed them, to keep them quiet.

For instance can you honestly say Stalin killed them? Even if the facts are there you could at best only say he killed them by proxy.

Stalin had them all killed, yeah.





. I could do the same to the Stalinists to make the same points about Trotsky. This is about logic and fact not Stalin or Trotsky.
No you couldnt.






This is all historical fact. It was a political counter-revolution. After that, Stalin's policy was to stop socialism happening anywhere in the world.

I say to you here that facts have to meet certain criteria to be labeled facts and most of these things are not actual facts but interpretation of various facts coupled with humanistic faults. Fact is a word that should be used very very carefully. We know his policy, and to him, he felt it was the way forward. If it fails is it sabotage? I do not think it intentional. I just see a man who did his best, for right or for wrong, to make a state capable of reaching the goals of Marx someday. If he had been right we would have no need for the conversation right?

He killed all the socialists in Russia, fact.

At the same time he deliberately sabotaged the revolution in Spain, fact.

After WW2 the stated policy of the Stalinists was to stop socialist revolutions, fact.

Did they mean it? Hard to say but many of their actions fit in with the stated policy.

Too much to go into here. This thread is really about the period 1924-8.






Let me give you a simple example. In China Stalin didnt back Mao, he backed the KMT, right up to 1948. The KMT were a capitalist party who murdered tens of thousands of communists, over a million actually. Stalin simply swapped sides when Mao won the civil war.

On this I cannot comment. I simply do not know enough about the actual events you are bringing up. I will assume the KMT is Shang Kei Shek's nationalist group. I am not too familair with Chinese history or the history of USSR/PRC/China relations. I will say this though, did you know we(US) supported Lenin, Trotsky, Ho Chi Minh, and Mao? The US did so because at that time it served a purpose. I don't think either one of us would think any of the US officials were Marxists or intended to bring about Socialism by these acts BUT THE ACTS THEMSELVES ARE FACTS. "Politics makes liars of us all" said Ben Franklin and he had a great point. One must not forget that things are not always what they seem and that some things have a deeper meaning just below the surface.

When did the US support Lenin and Trotsky? When did they support Mao? From 1945-8 Mao was fighting the KMT and Stalin and America were both backing the KMT.

And just because America does (so you claim, I await the evidence) strange things like that doesn't mean that a socialist would have any good reason to back a capitalist army against a supposedly socialist one. If there was, what was it?




Could it be any clearer?

I think this raises interesting questions that require more research. I don't think this makes it clearer. It should only encourage research and even then it would be difficult if not impossible to find under the circumstances of the day.


Research for you. I've spent years researching it.




Stalin's intention was for Eastern Europe to go capitalist.

How do you establish that? Eastern Bloc/Europe was state capitalist(just like the USSR was during it's entire existence) throughout its existence right? It was typically capitalist post WWI and it changed post WWII. We have not been fortunate enough to see Marxist Communism yet, right? Stalin spread his ideas Westward, and eastward for that matter, for right or for wrong, and he had plans to go all the way to the shores of the Atlantic in France before June 1941 and perhaps until his death. Stalin's problem is similar to Hitlers; they tried to do it all in one day because they sought credit and immortality through history. Lenin had far more understanding and patience yet he only got so far before the reigns were passed on. Had he lived on a little longer we would not be having this conversation either. He died far to soon at far to critical a point.

Read these
http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/cochran/1946/11/eeurope.htm
http://www.marxists.org/subject/stalinism/origins-future/ch2-1.htm
http://www.socialistworld.net/mob/doc/5201
http://www.socialistworld.net/mob/doc/5201



As for Jacob Schiff, sounds like conspiracy theory nonsense.

But is it?

I dunno if one or two capitalists saw a reason to back Lenin and Trotsky. The fact is that capitalism in general was extremely hostile to them, fought a war against them and implemented an economic blockade.




Trotsky was murdered by Stalins agents as he expected. First they raked his house with machine gun fire. Then they stuck an axe in his skull.

He could have been killed by his agents for sure; or he could have been killed by one, personally motivated, over zealous follower, who took it upon his self to kill Trotsky to save the USSR, in which all power was concentrated in Stalin.

Trotsky was killed by Ramon Mercader. Declassified documents show he was NKVD. Stalin presented him with a medal while he was in jail and when he got out the KGB gave him another one.






Previously they shot his son Sergei, they poisoned his other son, Lev. His daughter Nina died of TB. Stalin had her husband shot and her two children disappeared without trace.

Someone shot and poisoned them but do we really know for sure who gave the order or why? Could it have been followers who thought they were saving the revolution just as easily? Could it be that the Capitalists seized the opportunity to control the facts and the perception that was passed on to the world? Why would they not seize this opportunity? It could be that this is the case just as easily at times and this is just the nature of propaganda and politics. The same tactics are used all the time to discredit and blame the enemy for a murder you helped to facilitate or that you actually made happen. These things make the truth elusive, not clearer, so why indulge in it? Why not say Stalin and Trotsky must both be studied and analyzed equally and evenly. With equal scrutiny.

Look, Stalin purged a million from the CP. He sabotaged the revolution in Spain. He killed all the old Bolsheviks. He Killed 10,000 Trotskyists. He killed their families. It's all historical fact. Go and study it. Stalin ran a one man dictatorship and he launched the purge so he is responsible for all the deaths. Look at the big picture, read my links, dont waste your time with dodgy theories, look at the most obvious one first. Stalin was scared of revolution from below to establish genuine democratic socialism. So he was scared of Trotsky and Trotskyists. His purges lasted over 10 years. In fact they went on from 1926 to 1953 really, but obviously peaked in the mid 30s.




Trotsky's other daughter Zinaida committed suicide suffering from TB and depression. Stalin had let her leave Russia, but had made her choose which of her two children to leave behind! If that is not sadism I dont know what is. Her husband and her previous husband were both shot by Stalin's people. Her daughter Alexandra, who she was forced to leave behind was looked after by her father until he was shot, then by her grandmother. Her grandmother was then sent to labour camps where she perished. Alexandra herself was then exiled to Kazakhstan.

Stalin's violence started in about 1926-7, for instance Trotsky's friend Joffe killed himself after Stalin denied him medical treatment. In his suicide note he urged Trotsky to fight Stalin as hard as he could.

Even Stalin's wife topped herself after seeing her friends disappear one by one.

I grouped these last three together but I could have added them in above. These events all happened but the details again come from Trotsky or other enemies of Stalin.

Where do you get that idea from? And if they werent killed, what happened to them?





How are we to know if Trotsky's kids were smuggling letters and messages for the exiled 'enemy of the people' Trotsky or if they did far worse in the eyes of Stalin or even more importantly in the eyes of his followers. I used the words in parenthesis to show the mood of the time. The mood of the time would have made a person who was caught smuggling communiques from a resistance cell into the USSR an enemy of the state and it would have been seen as a crime against the people. Stalin didn't give preferential treatment to his own son when the Germans captured him so how many mistakes do you think he would allow before he had to act even against former comrades? Especially when he, just like Trotsky, swore he was the only one who could save and create Socialism. This was a battle of egos as much as a battle of polemics and the ego obscures reality.

Stalin knew the score, Trotsky's organisation was heavily penetrated by NKVD. It was a fucking giant frame-up, as is acknowledged universally today, except by a few die-hard Stalinists who are in denial just like fascists who deny the holocaust. Trotsky never said he was the only one who could create socialism, where do you get that idea from? It was not a battle of egos it was Marxists vs anti-Marxists. Revolution vs anti-revolution.





The reality is, though it is just one of many, that many evil things were done in his name just like the wrongs done in the name of Christ. We must extricate all of these realities to truly see a clearer picture. Then there are many more things that are wrongly attributed to Stalin. My point in ALL of this is that we simply cannot know so we shouldn't get so hung up, or gridlocked as Marxists, on unverifiable tidbits that obscure the bigger picture. The picture that shows what we must do in the future using all of the resources, no matter the source(s), to solve the problems before us. If that isn't in the spirit of Marx or even Trotsky; I would have to say that I am in the wrong forum. Simply said, we need to stay out of the political minefields laid by the personalities of the day and look at it more objectively and free of personality and human shortcomings that are there for all to see and on all sides. Once we get through that we can get to the crux of the matter and that is the realization of true Socialism.
I am objective. You need to research this. You need to see that Stalin led a political counter-revolution against socialism. Then when someone says to you communism is rubbish, look at Russia, you can explain to them that Stalinism happened because the revolution was isolated in a backward country, and was a counter-revolution.

[daft punk]

The realization of true socialism, or any socialism for that matter, requires the establishment of the DoP, or since I prefer more updated language, working class rule or workers' democracy. If we look honestly and realistically at Soviet history, IMO the conclusion we must draw is that workers' democracy never took hold there. Two major factors were clearly the material conditions of the time, immediately following the October Revolution there were three years of civil war in which military exigencies were paramount The second being the failure of the revolution to spread westward due to the failure of the Hungarian soviet, and the fact that at least two attempts to bring social revolution to Germany were crushed by the German army, and finally the defeat of the Soviet army on the banks of the Vistula.

In addition to these adverse material conditions, the majority of the Bolshevik leaders including Lenin, Stalin,Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Bukharin decided to quash dissent within the RCP (b) and institute other measures that created a one-party dictatorship over the working class.

Russia was a democracy with a coalition government. The Left SRs walked out of that government because they didnt like Lenin's plan for peace with Germany. They then killed the German ambassador to sabotage it. In the long run many of their members joined the Bolsheviks. This is how your one party state took place.




Stalin as the eventual dictator was merely the culmination of a process of centralization of power that was predicted quite accurately by Rosa Luxemburg.


No, not true, not at all. RL did have some criticism but she basically said the Bolsheviks did as well as they could and were not to be expected to perform miracles.

Lenin and Trotsky were fighting bureaucratisation. Stalin based his one man dictatorship on the very bureaucracy Lenin and Trotsky were fighting.

This is why Lenin wrote that Stalin should be removed from office, but of course Lenin had no idea how bad things would get under Stalin, with the slaughter of all the old Bolsheviks and all the socialists.

Stalin was the personification of the degeneration of the revolution, which was caused by it's isolation in a backward country. He narrowly avoided capitalist restoration and instead set up an anti-socialist dictatorship.



The reason why it is vitally important to revisit this history is that the working class is generally aware that something went dreadfully wrong in the Soviet Union and expects revolutionaries to be forthright in criticising dictatorial policies. In short, we have to present a vision of the revolution and workers' democracy where workers will indeed rule as a class, rather than be ruled over by a party or a dictator.

Lenin only clamped down on democracy in the civil war, that was inevitable. All the other parties were fighting with the enemy!

After the war there was a famine so the main priority was to get the economy kick started. By then the other parties didnt exist obviously, their fault not Lenins. In 1923 Trotsky called for more democracy but he was fighting his corner amidst the growing NEP, the growing degeneration. After Lenin died Stalin managed to get enough temporary support to quickly form a one man dictatorship and by 1926-7 the game was up. Stalin was crushing the revolution.

Then Stalin's stupidity wrecked the Chinese revolution, which he didnt consciously try to sabotage as such.

This led to a greater mood of defeat in Russia and a mood of defeat was a difficult one for Trotsky who was advocating socialism.

[Red Storm]

@Daft Punk... Did you get the PM I sent? I don't know if I am allowed yet and it didn't appear in my sent folder. Let me know and maybe I can figure a way to get it to you(I saved it) I will wait to see and only briefly touch on some of the points you brought up.

First, let me address the point I tried to make (second from top of your last post). I think you have misunderstood my point. I am simply saying that I could address the Stalinist's who are too pro-Stalin in the same way. It is about the thought distortions and has nothing to do with the men in particular. All people do it and it is simply a human characteristic that a researcher or someone interested in getting to the truth or facts must be careful not to engage in because it is the seed of self deception. I am not trying to place any value on either Trotsky or Stalin or anything like that.



He killed all the socialists in Russia, fact.

At the same time he deliberately sabotaged the revolution in Spain, fact.

After WW2 the stated policy of the Stalinists was to stop socialist revolutions, fact.

Did they mean it? Hard to say but many of their actions fit in with the stated policy.

Too much to go into here. This thread is really about the period 1924-8.

Note words in red. These are what are referred to in technical terms as thought distortions(in the psychology field). I will add a link about thought distortions for you but in short this amounts to a difficulty sorting fact from feeling at some point. All humans do it, even myself, so don't let the term, some interpretation of it, or my mentioning it, seem accusatory. This is what I meant above too(in reference to the Stalinists). We build our beliefs off of facts and feelings but feelings taken as fact leads to a distortion of the analysis. It also makes communication of ideas more difficult and leads to many misunderstandings or worse.

http://psychcentral.com/lib/2009/15-common-cognitive-distortions/

Now note the blue words. These are the conclusions you have made. Since it is plainly obvious, due to the survivors of the Stalin era that exist physically, to this day, this cannot be a fact in the case of the first sentence. It is a thought distortion and though it sounds impressive and convincing to some, it is not very convincing to critical thinkers. Pay attention Comrade because I am trying to put the power in your hands and make you a even more powerful tool of Marxism and a more effective debater. Passionate belief you have in spades.

In the second sentence you are establishing this how? How do you deduce this was deliberate as opposed to an unintended outcome? Maybe there is a smoking gun but nothing that I have seen or read is even remotely close. You are trying to establish a motive when it is impossible. You cannot assume to know Stalin's motive. At best you can say he stated this(fact) or that he stated this and then hope he wasn't lying or playing politics at the time, but you cannot know his feelings at all.

In the third sentence, I have only highlighted the word 'fact' due to the potential for the first part of the sentence turning out to be a thought distortion. I have not read the policy but I am willing to go out on a limb and say they didn't actually state that their literal goal was to "stop socialist revolutions" even if this appears to be the outcome of said policy. I expect this will turn out to be a interpretation not a actual fact. Consider this, and the blue word 'fact' has been potentially misapplied. This is more a matter of potential on this sentence but I would need to read the policy itself to verify or refute this.

I have no real objection to the fourth sentence or the fifth. The blue is only there to show that you already know in your subconscious what I am saying to you. You really are being candid there; but I am not well versed enough in the said policy to comment one way or the other so I will refrain from doing so now. Hint hint... psst psst can you pass me a link brother? Either way this is secondary to the bigger issue but I do want to learn about it and I know you have done a whole lot of research and want to share it with me. Believe me, I am reading as many links as I have the time for.

When did the US support Lenin and Trotsky? When did they support Mao? From 1945-8 Mao was fighting the KMT and Stalin and America were both backing the KMT.

The US government facilitated Trotsky's re-entry into Europe and Russia by issuing him an American passport. Lenin used US businessmens capital to establish a government. All the while knowing, through it's spying, that he was a revolutionary who aimed to overthrow the Russian government. A government who was their ally at the time. Mao was supported by the US, during WWII and after for several years, just like they did Chaing Kai Shek and Ho Chi Minh against the Japanese during the war. The OSS agent, through whom the US gov dealt with Ho Chi Minh during the war, even warned the higher ups at the OSS, that if we ignored him he would 'turn against us'.

Stalin's support of the KMT is JUST as unexplainable as the US support of Mao that even had Congressmen and officials denying before a committee that Mao was even a Communist but instead a 'agrarian reformer' and therefore deserved of our continued support beyond the fight against Japan. I cannot give you the exact amount of years but I can say that their support of Mao was more than the little over two years Stalin supported the KMT in the post war era. Now you ask what does this mean. My point is and has always been that it has many possibilities and may be indeterminable due to politics.

And just because America does (so you claim, I await the evidence) strange things like that doesn't mean that a socialist would have any good reason to back a capitalist army against a supposedly socialist one. If there was, what was it?

The evidence is there and that is beyond dispute. Simply put it was mutually beneficial at the time and nothing in this world is simply black and white but various shades of grey. My point is we cannot just haphazardly jump to conclusions that fit a idea when there are few facts to work with.

Yet as Marxist's we shouldn't be blind or naive to the fact that the capitalists will support anyone, or anything, if they can profit from it one way or another. None of this makes Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Trotsky or even Stalin a questionable or un-dedicated Marxist just because we do not have all of the facts that they had at their disposal before deciding to strategically align their selves with an enemy at that time. Those things tend to be kept secret, or lied about, by bureaucratic establishments, no matter the flavor, to protect the interest they are working for. In the case of Marxists they tend to be working toward their idea of how to achieve Marxism and I have to give the benefit of the doubt until it is proven otherwise. To not do so is to engage in intellectual dishonesty even if this is not the intent.

All this really shows factually is that a, odd, seemingly contradictory, yet mutually beneficial, relationship existed at some point. To attempt to establish or discern a motive to some link, like the ones above, in order to meet another agenda is an error if the facts do not support it. And by facts, I do mean actual empirical facts beyond someone halfway around the world, and without the full details that the actual person(making the decision) had in their hands, making unverified claims to serve their own purpose. More times than not, this is propaganda of some form. It is also opportunism at it's worst. This is regardless of whether it is Stalin, Trotsky, or Jane Doe the book writer and historian doing the writing. This leads to great and exciting reading but does little to clarify the real situation unless they use actual facts to support it.

Research for you. I've spent years researching it.

Research for anyone who seeks truth, enlightenment, and understanding unless you think you are through with research and have it all sorted out and nothing new to learn or study. I don't think you feel you are done with research but that could be implied from the above. I know you have spent years researching it but you will spend many more years doing so and on your death bed you will come to the realization that you never had enough time to do enough research. In fact I want to know the very facts that are in your head and that is valuable information but you will never be done researching and reformulating unless you are content with being somewhat in the dark or possibly outright wrong.

Trotsky was killed by Ramon Mercader. Declassified documents show he was NKVD. Stalin presented him with a medal while he was in jail and when he got out the KGB gave him another one.

It would appearthat way according to many writers from the anti-stalinsit camp and this includes Sudaplatov when you consider he did 15 years before making these statements. I don't see that it matters, you don't throw the baby out with the dirty bathwater, and Stalin made valuable contributions and even valuable mistakes that we can now learn from once we stop siding up in old feuds and see it for what it was. This requires dismissing non-factual or non-verifiable evidence and sticking to fact and fact supported interpretations. The same could be said for the Stalinist camp in regard to Trotsky but I am dealing with you because I see a boat load of intellectual potential awaiting actual realization. Simply put stop limiting yourself old boy because you are far to valuable to the cause. You remind me of myself not so long ago.

I dunno if one or two capitalists saw a reason to back Lenin and Trotsky. The fact is that capitalism in general was extremely hostile to them, fought a war against them and implemented an economic blockade.

Spot on. I couldn't agree with you more. They used every tool and every person they could to destroy it and profit while it was alive and still kicking. My point was we cannot just guess at their motives or use circumstantial evidence to establish a serious view of their motives. They used the imperialists(there were more than one or two involved) and the imperialists sought to get over on them. Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky all fought this tooth and nail in the USSR. Yet they needed financial backing and this amount was enough to get the USSR started and enabled it to weather several stormy years. The ends justified the means. Lenin and Stalin were both willing to crack a few eggs to make a omelet because they were practical and not unrealistically idealistic. For this some refer to them as right wing.

Look, Stalin purged a million from the CP. He sabotaged the revolution in Spain. He killed all the old Bolsheviks. He Killed 10,000 Trotskyists. He killed their families. It's all historical fact. Go and study it. Stalin ran a one man dictatorship and he launched the purge so he is responsible for all the deaths. Look at the big picture, read my links, dont waste your time with dodgy theories, look at the most obvious one first. Stalin was scared of revolution from below to establish genuine democratic socialism. So he was scared of Trotsky and Trotskyists. His purges lasted over 10 years. In fact they went on from 1926 to 1953 really, but obviously peaked in the mid 30s.

I actually tried to look into that last night which is where I came across Sudaplatov(I think that is right but Gramsci Guy mentioned him earlier). I honestly think there is more to it than we can ever know and I am also very well versed in modern European history and know most of the accusations with the exception of Trotsky's family. I am unimpressed with the historical narrative on Stalin. Meaning; facts are scarce and legend and myth are in abundance. I do not like to rely on testimony unless it is supported by concrete facts. You would have an easier time comprehending the Holy Ascension than sorting out that mess. So why bother?

Just study it with as much objectivity, meaning stop taking sides, as you possibly can. You have not demonstrated enough objectivity, even when you mentioned Anthony Beevor in another thread, to really justify any other take than to study it as best you can objectively. The best you will do is separate the BS from the real lessons but you will never be able to establish much else from that mess. It is shrouded in myth. History is that way and trust me when I tell you I know a thing or two about history. There is a reason courts require more than just eyewitness testimony to convict a man of murder(testimony of Stalin's enemies or Trotsky would not be given enough significance or weight to convict). It is unreliable. To base your belief on that is the scientific equivalent of 'conspiracy theory'.

Where do you get that idea from? And if they werent killed, what happened to them?

Did I not say that they happened? The deaths I mean? At least as far as I know anyway. According to one account on one of his son's I believe it was, it is believed and reported, that one son died in a GULAG riot and uprising. That very well could be the case. Or it could have been Stalin himself with a big shiny blade. Or it could be aliens from outer space but in reality I find it irrelevant unless you plan to put him on trial. If not, get over it, and without taking sides look at it from a factual standpoint, not one composed of hearsay, in order to make an overall assessment of his strengths and weaknesses, successes and failures. No matter what you do you shouldn't bog down in the unverifiable nonsense, true or not, that hides the real Stalin or Trotsky for that matter. Otherwise you end up with a caricature rather than a honest appraisal. Caricature's, like good stories, are entertaining but do little to help us learn the facts.

Stalin knew the score, Trotsky's organisation was heavily penetrated by NKVD.

So why the need for all the attempts if his group was so heavily penetrated and the NKVD was in such close contact? Why so many ugly high profile botched attempts when it could have been neat and clean with poison? Could it be that he lived until 1940 because Stalin didn't want him dead at that time if at all? It seemed a easy task for the NKVD so why all the delay and failure? Why look so incompetent when it appears the access was there for a quite and efficient assassination? We end up with more questions than answers unless we seek a oversimplified answer.

Trotsky never said he was the only one who could create socialism, where do you get that idea from?

I was actually referring to Stalin but Trotsky certainly seemed to be suggesting he could do it better did he not?

It was not a battle of egos it was Marxists vs anti-Marxists. Revolution vs anti-revolution.

This is certainly how both Stalin and Trotsky wanted it to be viewed but is it? It really was, on both accounts, a matter of my Marxism is right and yours is wrong. People are people and both Trotsky and Stalin were human. The primary difference was that Stalin had close to 300 million people that he was responsible for in an official capacity and Trotsky need only account for himself and his family which didn't leave with him for exile. At least not all of them.

I am objective. You need to research this. You need to see that Stalin led a political counter-revolution against socialism. Then when someone says to you communism is rubbish, look at Russia, you can explain to them that Stalinism happened because the revolution was isolated in a backward country, and was a counter-revolution.

I am researching it and you are helping me to do so Comrade. I truly thank you for that and for your time as well. Please understand that I am attempting to reciprocate the favor in my own way.

I need to see it without attaching myself to one party or the other. Otherwise I am a subscriber not a thinker.

When someone says Communism is rubbish, or communism failed, all I have to say is it has never been tried and it has never been seen before with human eyes. All we saw was a 'Workers state' and I do not need to use Trotsky or any other complicated long winded theory to justify an idea that hasn't ever been realized in this world. That line of thinking, used by Trotsky and later Krushchev, didn't work. It didn't convince enough people for us to keep using it in the hopes to sway the masses or to argue a moot point. Learn from history or it will repeat it's self.

I hope you see my point on this last bit. We don't have to defend an idea that was never tried or realized just because someone wants us to feel the need to do so. Think about that for a minute my friend. Take care and I will talk to you tomorrow.:)

[Paulappaul]

If you don't like Bourgeois Politicians talking about the Revolution, you might want to check out the real prole opposition by Alexandra Kollontai and the Left Coms

[daft punk]

He killed all the socialists in Russia, fact.

At the same time he deliberately sabotaged the revolution in Spain, fact.

After WW2 the stated policy of the Stalinists was to stop socialist revolutions, fact.

Did they mean it? Hard to say but many of their actions fit in with the stated policy.

Too much to go into here. This thread is really about the period 1924-8.

Dont get too hung up on my language. Obviously Stalin didnt personally kill every socialist. He gave the orders and not every single socialist was killed, but tens of thousands were, as many as possible, anyone who was outspoken would be almost certainly killed.

At the end of WW2...fact. I then qualify that by offering another theory, that they didnt mean it, but the evidence is that they did mean it. Maybe they kept their options open. The fact is that the public statements were that communism was not the agenda and the actions that followed were in line with that. See the two links I gave you .



In the second sentence you are establishing this how? How do you deduce this was deliberate as opposed to an unintended outcome? Maybe there is a smoking gun but nothing that I have seen or read is even remotely close. You are trying to establish a motive when it is impossible. You cannot assume to know Stalin's motive. At best you can say he stated this(fact) or that he stated this and then hope he wasn't lying or playing politics at the time, but you cannot know his feelings at all.

read the two links I gave you. Stated aims PLUS actions.



In the third sentence, I have only highlighted the word 'fact' due to the potential for the first part of the sentence turning out to be a thought distortion. I have not read the policy but I am willing to go out on a limb and say they didn't actually state that their literal goal was to "stop socialist revolutions" even if this appears to be the outcome of said policy. I expect this will turn out to be a interpretation not a actual fact. Consider this, and the blue word 'fact' has been potentially misapplied. This is more a matter of potential on this sentence but I would need to read the policy itself to verify or refute this.

read the links



I have no real objection to the fourth sentence or the fifth. The blue is only there to show that you already know in your subconscious what I am saying to you. You really are being candid there; but I am not well versed enough in the said policy to comment one way or the other so I will refrain from doing so now. Hint hint... psst psst can you pass me a link brother? Either way this is secondary to the bigger issue but I do want to learn about it and I know you have done a whole lot of research and want to share it with me. Believe me, I am reading as many links as I have the time for.

what do you want a link on?

I gave you two to show that the aim was to establish capitalism, plus the ones on China and Spain.

Let me give you a quick example. In France, which wasnt even backward, Stalinist leaders became ministers in the capitalist de Gaulle government. They pressured the Viet Minh not to go too far.

"Earlier in September 1945, the French Communist Party cell in Saigon had warned the Viet Minh, then trying to resist the French re-occupation of Saigon, that “any premature adventures” towards independence might “not be in line with Soviet perspectives”. In other words the French Stalinists did everything to prevent ‘disturbances’ such as revolts of the masses in the colonial world, in order not to disrupt the post-1945 attempt of Russian Stalinism to arrive at an agreement with imperialism to maintain the status quo. Fall explains: “At home, the French Communist leaders in parliament (the Party chief, Maurice Thorez, was Vice-Premier at the time) did not block the first Indochina War budget and all the emergency measures connected with the prosecution of the first phase of the war. There can be no doubt that a Communist-provoked government crisis in the winter of 1946-47 would have brought a military crisis in Indochina and might have caused the war to end in a compromise because of lack of supplies and manpower on the French side.” 17
The gratitude of the French bourgeoisie was evident when “French conservative politicians rose in the National Assembly during a crucial appropriations debate from March 14-18, 1947, to thank their own Communist colleagues and the Soviet Union for leaving France to fight its war in Indochina without outside disturbance.” 18"
http://www.socialistworld.net/pubs/vietnam/c1.html


bookmark that article to read later. Note the last paragraph. Communists aiding French rule over Vietnam. These are facts. The Communists were kicked out of the government later in order to get Marshal Aid.





When did the US support Lenin and Trotsky? When did they support Mao? From 1945-8 Mao was fighting the KMT and Stalin and America were both backing the KMT.

The US government facilitated Trotsky's re-entry into Europe and Russia by issuing him an American passport. Lenin used US businessmens capital to establish a government. All the while knowing, through it's spying, that he was a revolutionary who aimed to overthrow the Russian government. A government who was their ally at the time.

can you support these claims? Have you researched them? In any case by 1918 Britain and America were at war with the Bolsheviks. Regarding Trotsky's passport, I think he explains in his biography how he got it, if I remember rightly the Provisional Government actually said he could have one. Anyway, it is not very relevant. You were truing to make a comparison of two completely different things, I think it was why Stalin backed the communist-murdering KMT. The American President did not back the Bolsheviks. He was at war with them, and imposed an economic stranglehold.







Mao was supported by the US, during WWII and after for several years, just like they did Chaing Kai Shek and Ho Chi Minh against the Japanese during the war. The OSS agent, through whom the US gov dealt with Ho Chi Minh during the war, even warned the higher ups at the OSS, that if we ignored him he would 'turn against us'.

Please support this. The US armed Chinag to he could fight Mao at the end of the war. During the war was different, everyone was fighting the Japanese (although the KMT did spend quite a bit of time collaborating with them, and fighting Mao's troops).






Stalin's support of the KMT is JUST as unexplainable as the US support of Mao that even had Congressmen and officials denying before a committee that Mao was even a Communist but instead a 'agrarian reformer' and therefore deserved of our continued support beyond the fight against Japan. I cannot give you the exact amount of years but I can say that their support of Mao was more than the little over two years Stalin supported the KMT in the post war era. Now you ask what does this mean. My point is and has always been that it has many possibilities and may be indeterminable due to politics.

No. Stalin backed Chiang from 1925-1948. The US supported Mao when? During the fight against the Japanese. read the link I sent on China.


Mao was supported by the US, during WWII and after for several years, just like they did Chaing Kai Shek and Ho Chi Minh against the Japanese during the war. The OSS agent, through whom the US gov dealt with Ho Chi Minh during the war, even warned the higher ups at the OSS, that if we ignored him he would 'turn against us'.
[/quote]
Please support this. The US armed Chinag to he could fight Mao at the end of the war. During the war was different, everyone was fighting the Japanese (although the KMT did spend quite a bit of time collaborating with them, and fighting Mao's troops).





And just because America does (so you claim, I await the evidence) strange things like that doesn't mean that a socialist would have any good reason to back a capitalist army against a supposedly socialist one. If there was, what was it?

The evidence is there and that is beyond dispute. Simply put it was mutually beneficial at the time and nothing in this world is simply black and white but various shades of grey. My point is we cannot just haphazardly jump to conclusions that fit a idea when there are few facts to work with.

I'm not really interested in whether some capitalist thought it a good idea to fund his class enemy in 1917. Sorry. Red herring.





Yet as Marxist's we shouldn't be blind or naive to the fact that the capitalists will support anyone, or anything, if they can profit from it one way or another. None of this makes Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Trotsky or even Stalin a questionable or un-dedicated Marxist just because we do not have all of the facts that they had at their disposal before deciding to strategically align their selves with an enemy at that time. Those things tend to be kept secret, or lied about, by bureaucratic establishments, no matter the flavor, to protect the interest they are working for. In the case of Marxists they tend to be working toward their idea of how to achieve Marxism and I have to give the benefit of the doubt until it is proven otherwise. To not do so is to engage in intellectual dishonesty even if this is not the intent.

So, in 1925-8 The Chinese Communist Party is at war with the KMT. America and Stalin are backing the KMT. And you think Stalin might have a secret reason that backing a party who were killing communists in China and Vietnam in order to achieve communism.

No. That is just crazy. There is not cunning plan. The KMT had killed a million Communists and the would not rest until they killed them all. They were not going to establish socialism, not in a million years.








All this really shows factually is that a, odd, seemingly contradictory, yet mutually beneficial, relationship existed at some point. To attempt to establish or discern a motive to some link, like the ones above, in order to meet another agenda is an error if the facts do not support it. And by facts, I do mean actual empirical facts beyond someone halfway around the world, and without the full details that the actual person(making the decision) had in their hands, making unverified claims to serve their own purpose. More times than not, this is propaganda of some form. It is also opportunism at it's worst. This is regardless of whether it is Stalin, Trotsky, or Jane Doe the book writer and historian doing the writing. This leads to great and exciting reading but does little to clarify the real situation unless they use actual facts to support it.

see above. Stalin backed the KMT against the CCP and that is the fact. No socialist would ever have dreamed of doing that. There is no cunning plan. The KMT had a goal - to kill all communists. You cant just give Stalin the benefit of the doubt, there is no doubt! He backed the KMT because he thought they would win. They were far better armed, especially when America supplied hundreds of warplanes. Everyone expected the KMT to win so Stalin wanted to back the winning side.

Mao was planning for a capitalist economy anyway, so that aspect didnt worry Stalin too much.




Research for you. I've spent years researching it.

Research for anyone who seeks truth, enlightenment, and understanding unless you think you are through with research and have it all sorted out and nothing new to learn or study. I don't think you feel you are done with research but that could be implied from the above. I know you have spent years researching it but you will spend many more years doing so and on your death bed you will come to the realization that you never had enough time to do enough research. In fact I want to know the very facts that are in your head and that is valuable information but you will never be done researching and reformulating unless you are content with being somewhat in the dark or possibly outright wrong.
No. I can learn more detail, but there is no way I am outright wrong. I am a scientist. I studied geology. Geology is like detective work, tying to figure out what happened hundreds of million years ago. Many events eg mass extinctions were are not sure of the causes, and there could be multiple causes. But on my death bed I am not gonna consider that the young earth creationists are right, that man was put on the earth 10,000 years ago, fully formed. It is just bullshit. Yes they do have one or two geologists, and yes they do quote (read quote out of context, like the Stalinists do) proper geoogists and evolutionists. But their method is unscientific and dishonest.

Concentrate on the most straightforward, scientific explanation. Dont get so worked up that there might be truth in the other version. There is none. If you read the logical, scientific version, there is no room for doubt. No need to waste time reading garbage.

If you are interested, my dad is a lay preacher by the way. And it was he who got me interested in geology and evolution as a child. I was climbing mountains and collecting fossils with my preacher dad before I was in my teens. This was in the 1970s.




[QUOTE=Red Storm;2378389]

Trotsky was killed by Ramon Mercader. Declassified documents show he was NKVD. Stalin presented him with a medal while he was in jail and when he got out the KGB gave him another one.

It would appearthat way according to many writers from the anti-stalinsit camp and this includes Sudaplatov when you consider he did 15 years before making these statements. I don't see that it matters, you don't throw the baby out with the dirty bathwater, and Stalin made valuable contributions and even valuable mistakes that we can now learn from once we stop siding up in old feuds and see it for what it was. This requires dismissing non-factual or non-verifiable evidence and sticking to fact and fact supported interpretations. The same could be said for the Stalinist camp in regard to Trotsky but I am dealing with you because I see a boat load of intellectual potential awaiting actual realization. Simply put stop limiting yourself old boy because you are far to valuable to the cause. You remind me of myself not so long ago.

What could be said for the Stalinist camp? Trotsky didnt go round murdering Stalinists. There is no baby. Just dirty bathwater. There is nothing to redeem Stalin. The fact is this, Trotsky got killed, most of his family got killed, thousands of supporters got killed, their families mostly got killed, a million were expelled from the CP, the Spanish revolution was deliberately sabotaged, and we all know how, why and by whom.





Look, Stalin purged a million from the CP. He sabotaged the revolution in Spain. He killed all the old Bolsheviks. He Killed 10,000 Trotskyists. He killed their families. It's all historical fact. Go and study it. Stalin ran a one man dictatorship and he launched the purge so he is responsible for all the deaths. Look at the big picture, read my links, dont waste your time with dodgy theories, look at the most obvious one first. Stalin was scared of revolution from below to establish genuine democratic socialism. So he was scared of Trotsky and Trotskyists. His purges lasted over 10 years. In fact they went on from 1926 to 1953 really, but obviously peaked in the mid 30s.

I actually tried to look into that last night which is where I came across Sudaplatov(I think that is right but Gramsci Guy mentioned him earlier). I honestly think there is more to it than we can ever know and I am also very well versed in modern European history and know most of the accusations with the exception of Trotsky's family. I am unimpressed with the historical narrative on Stalin. Meaning; facts are scarce and legend and myth are in abundance. I do not like to rely on testimony unless it is supported by concrete facts. You would have an easier time comprehending the Holy Ascension than sorting out that mess. So why bother?

Please read my links before continuing. Get it out of your head that there was some secret reason why a socialist would do the world's bet impression of a massive anti-socialist. This is a waste of time.




Just study it with as much objectivity, meaning stop taking sides, as you possibly can.

You write a letter to the Geology Society, telling them to be objective, stop taking sides with the creationists (as if they even bother). See if anyone takes it seriously.




You have not demonstrated enough objectivity, even when you mentioned Anthony Beevor in another thread, to really justify any other take than to study it as best you can objectively. The best you will do is separate the BS from the real lessons but you will never be able to establish much else from that mess. It is shrouded in myth. History is that way and trust me when I tell you I know a thing or two about history. There is a reason courts require more than just eyewitness testimony to convict a man of murder(testimony of Stalin's enemies or Trotsky would not be given enough significance or weight to convict). It is unreliable. To base your belief on that is the scientific equivalent of 'conspiracy theory'.

No. You are desperately looking for some conspiracy theory when there is one. It really is quite simple. The revolution degenerated. Trotsky tried to fight that, Stalin went with the flow, took personal advantage of it, facilitated it.




Stalin knew the score, Trotsky's organisation was heavily penetrated by NKVD.

So why the need for all the attempts if his group was so heavily penetrated and the NKVD was in such close contact? Why so many ugly high profile botched attempts when it could have been neat and clean with poison? Could it be that he lived until 1940 because Stalin didn't want him dead at that time if at all? It seemed a easy task for the NKVD so why all the delay and failure? Why look so incompetent when it appears the access was there for a quite and efficient assassination? We end up with more questions than answers unless we seek a oversimplified answer.

Sorry, why are you writing this? Stalin had Trotsky killed, what more is there to discuss? NKVD penetrated the organisation in the 1930s but maybe Trotsky was more use alive than dead at the time to Stalin. Trotsky was Stalin's bogeyman, his excuse to purge thousands of socialists in Russia. I guess Stalin saved him til last. Or maybe Stalin didnt manage to properly penetrate the Trotsky's circle in Mexico.






Trotsky never said he was the only one who could create socialism, where do you get that idea from?

I was actually referring to Stalin but Trotsky certainly seemed to be suggesting he could do it better did he not?

Well of course he could do better, you can see that from the OP of this thread. Plus he wouldnt have killed all the socialists, or had as many killed as possible if you want to be pedantic.


It was not a battle of egos it was Marxists vs anti-Marxists. Revolution vs anti-revolution.

This is certainly how both Stalin and Trotsky wanted it to be viewed but is it? It really was, on both accounts, a matter of my Marxism is right and yours is wrong. People are people and both Trotsky and Stalin were human. The primary difference was that Stalin had close to 300 million people that he was responsible for in an official capacity and Trotsky need only account for himself and his family which didn't leave with him for exile. At least not all of them.

I give up. Go back to the OP, read that and discuss it.





I am objective. You need to research this. You need to see that Stalin led a political counter-revolution against socialism. Then when someone says to you communism is rubbish, look at Russia, you can explain to them that Stalinism happened because the revolution was isolated in a backward country, and was a counter-revolution.

I am researching it and you are helping me to do so Comrade. I truly thank you for that and for your time as well. Please understand that I am attempting to reciprocate the favor in my own way.

I need to see it without attaching myself to one party or the other. Otherwise I am a subscriber not a thinker.

No, you are wasting you time and blinkering yourself. Try imagining you are sat on the fence between geologists and creationists advocating that there might be truth to both sides.




When someone says Communism is rubbish, or communism failed, all I have to say is it has never been tried and it has never been seen before with human eyes. All we saw was a 'Workers state' and I do not need to use Trotsky or any other complicated long winded theory to justify an idea that hasn't ever been realized in this world. That line of thinking, used by Trotsky and later Krushchev, didn't work. It didn't convince enough people for us to keep using it in the hopes to sway the masses or to argue a moot point. Learn from history or it will repeat it's self.

I hope you see my point on this last bit. We don't have to defend an idea that was never tried or realized just because someone wants us to feel the need to do so. Think about that for a minute my friend. Take care and I will talk to you tomorrow.:)

Yes Khrushchev began the process of leaking the truth out. Of course the Trotskyists already knew it. There were other people eg Trepper.

You miss the point. We have to be able to explain why the workers state in Russia failed, why it turned back to capitalism. Trotskyism can do this, Trotsky predicted in in 1935. It failed because the revolution degenerated in the mid 1920s due to it being isolated in a backward country.

Lenin, 1922:

"If we take Moscow with its 4,700 Communists in responsible positions, and if we take that huge bureaucratic machine, that gigantic heap, we must ask: who is directing whom? I doubt very much whether it can truthfully be said that the Communists are directing that heap. To tell the truth they are not directing, they are being directed."

[daft punk]

please read all the links and stick to the OP as this is getting too broad. The purges, Spain, China, they are really beyond this thread, apart from the revolution in China 1925-7. I dont wanna spread you too thin. We can do other threads. And I am here to give the Trotskyist version, as best I can, not find a fence to sit on.

[Devrim]

please read all the links and stick to the OP as this is getting too broad.

To put it very simply, 'The Platform of the Opposition'- too little, too late.

Devrim

[daft punk]

To put it very simply, 'The Platform of the Opposition'- too little, too late.

Devrim

Well, they were formed in 1923, and even before that Lenin was battling against the bureaucracy, the bourgeois and so on. They put a document out in 1923 calling for more democracy. And Lenin had spelled out what should be done re the economy before that. Also bear in mind Lenin died and Trotsky was ill. But the key think is that the tide had turned, from revolution to counter-revolution, due to it's isloation in a backward country, exactly as Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky predicted. Trotsky was trying to reverse the tide, to swim against the current, but Stalin was swimming with it, with the kulaks, the NEPmen, the bureaucrats, the arse licking careerists.

Marx:

"...this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced..."

[Thirsty Crow]

Well, they were formed in 1923, and even before that Lenin was battling against the bureaucracy, the bourgeois and so on.
Only if you collapse the Left Opposition of 1923, which dissolved in 1925, with the United Opposition.

[Omsk]

If we are to look from a non-sectarian perspective,the Left-Oppositon completely failed in their attempts to gain popular support and to actually try to bring about the end of the people they were fighting against.Too few people,not enough acts and deeds and too much unreasonable decissions and proposals in the past.

Maybe the Trotskyite factions in the 21st century will learn from their mistakes.

[Devrim]

Well, they were formed in 1923,

By which point the revolutionary wave that followed the First World war had ebbed, and the Russian working class was exhausted.


and even before that Lenin was battling against the bureaucracy

It is true that Lenin recognised the dangers in the bureaucracy, but his solution was not to trust in the working class, but to call for more bureaucrats to monitor the existing ones.


They put a document out in 1923 calling for more democracy.

Three years after they had voted to suppress factions within the party at the 10th congress. As Lenin put it:


all members of the Russian Communist Party who are in the slightest degree suspicious or unreliable ... should be got rid of


But the key think is that the tide had turned, from revolution to counter-revolution, due to it's isloation in a backward country, exactly as Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky predicted. Trotsky was trying to reverse the tide, to swim against the current, but Stalin was swimming with it, with the kulaks, the NEPmen, the bureaucrats, the arse licking careerists.

As you say the tide had turned, which is why I said it was 'too late'. During the period that there was still life in the Russian revolution Trotsky had stood against left factions in the party, and against initiatives from the working class. By the time it came to his opposition the revolution had essentially already been lost, the left in the party defeated, and the working class exhausted.

Devrim

[daft punk]

Only if you collapse the Left Opposition of 1923, which dissolved in 1925, with the United Opposition.
same thing just with Zinoviev and Kamenev


If we are to look from a non-sectarian perspective,the Left-Oppositon completely failed in their attempts to gain popular support and to actually try to bring about the end of the people they were fighting against.Too few people,not enough acts and deeds and too much unreasonable decissions and proposals in the past.

Maybe the Trotskyite factions in the 21st century will learn from their mistakes.

And what do you care? You have made zero comments on the OP.

They didnt get enough support because they represented revolution and Stalin represented counter-revolution, and the objective circumstance was counter-revolution, so Stalin represented the actual conditions. This was intensified by the debacle in China, even though it was Stalin's fault and Trotsky was right, the fact remains that defeat leads to counter-revolution.

Also there is the fact that people who supported Trotsky lost their jobs, couldnt get jobs, were denied medical treatment, were intimidated, blackmailed, driven to suicide, not allowed to speak and so on. There was a massive media campaign of lies. Opposition meetings were attacked by hooligans blowing whistles, fascist style. Opposition members couldnt speak anywhere. They were treated as criminals.



Originally Posted by daft punk http://www.revleft.com/vb/revleft/buttons/viewpost.gif (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?p=2378513#post2378513)
"Well, they were formed in 1923,"
By which point the revolutionary wave that followed the First World war had ebbed, and the Russian working class was exhausted.

Precisely. The revolution went on the ebb.




It is true that Lenin recognised the dangers in the bureaucracy, but his solution was not to trust in the working class, but to call for more bureaucrats to monitor the existing ones.

Hmm, not sure about that. You have to bear in mind that in 1921 there was a famine, hardly any industry, and the working class was a tiny % of the population. What they needed were some desperate measures, and democracy was simply an unsuitable luxury at that particular moment.

I think Trotsky once said, if you are on board a runaway train, you dont convene all the passengers to debate whether the engine driver should apply the brakes.


Originally Posted by daft punk http://www.revleft.com/vb/revleft/buttons/viewpost.gif (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?p=2378513#post2378513)
"They put a document out in 1923 calling for more democracy. "


Three years after they had voted to suppress factions within the party at the 10th congress. As Lenin put it:

"Originally Posted by Lenin
all members of the Russian Communist Party who are in the slightest degree suspicious or unreliable ... should be got rid of "


kicked out, not purged, and it was the bourgeois elements, the careerists, the bureaucrats he was getting kicked out of the party. There was still a civil war going on at the time.




As you say the tide had turned, which is why I said it was 'too late'. During the period that there was still life in the Russian revolution Trotsky had stood against left factions in the party, and against initiatives from the working class. By the time it came to his opposition the revolution had essentially already been lost, the left in the party defeated, and the working class exhausted.

Devrim

Yes, easy to say in hindsight, from the comfort of your armchair. Now I do take what you say seriously (unlike what the Stalinists say), but what else was Trotsky and Lenin supposed to do in 1918-21? Even the anarchists, who can be very biassed and misinformed, agree that Russia was a democracy in 1918. So obviously Lenin and Trotsky started out with the intention of democracy. It was the other parties, including the Left SRs, who sabotaged that.

The Workers Opposition were sort of suppressed, but they still joined the Reds in putting down the Kronstadt mutiny straight after the conference. They had a lot of support, but what they wanted was tantamount to The Bolsheviks handing all decision making over to the unions, with the Bolsheviks having no say as to what went on. This would not have saved the revolution, as far as I can see. However it is an interesting area to explore.

[daft punk]

In fact, the purge you mention, was the suggestion of the Workers Opposition:

wiki

"The Tenth Congress (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10th_Congress_of_the_Russian_Communist_Party_%28b% 29) of the Russian Communist Party, in 1921, condemned the Workers' Opposition for factionalism, but adopted some of its proposals, including conducting a purge of the Party and organizing better supply of workers, to improve workers' living conditions. Several leaders of the Workers' Opposition, including Shlyapnikov, were elected to the Party Central Committee. Nevertheless, Party leaders subsequently undertook a campaign to subordinate trade unions to the Party and to harass and intimidate those who opposed this campaign."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers%27_Opposition

this article looks useful

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1922/02/tu.htm

"
Introduction: The political context

by Guy Desolre

From the seizure of power in October 1917 to 1925, and even to 1929 (when Tomsky was removed as president of the Central Council of Trade Unions), there were many discussions on the question of the trade unions in Soviet Russia. All of them, in one form or another, were aimed at determining the place of the unions in society and in the state, with respect to the management of the economy and with respect to the party. What was at stake in all these discussions was the question of the relationship of the masses to the revolution. In general, these discussions are little known, except for the one that occurred in 1920-21, which on the contrary has been the object of much deeper examination, both by historians of the Russian revolution (E.H. Carr, Isaac Deutscher, etc.) and by those who claim allegiance to the heritage of Bolshevism.
We believe that the explanation for this is not difficult to find. The 192.0-21 discussion, which saw Lenin successfully oppose the Trotsky-Bukharin tendency and the tendency known as the Workers Opposition,[1] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1922/02/tu.htm#b1) later permitted, during the Stalin era, the establishment of one of the most durable caricatural images ever seen: the image of a Trotsky trying to “tighten the belts” of the workers and place the unions under the control of the state, or even militarize them; the image of a Shliapnikov trying to reduce the role of the party to nothing, trying to counterpose the unions to the Soviet state and the party; and finally, against them, the wise Lenin, supported by Stalin, putting forward the idea of the union as a place of workers’ education (a school of management, administration, and communism). This is the image presented by the 1938 edition of the book “History of the Communist party of the Soviet Union (Bolshevik),” an image which has also been painted by all official historiography in the USSR since then.[2] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1922/02/tu.htm#b2) But this same image has also marred, at least in part, a whole series of other works dealing with the trade-union question. [3] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1922/02/tu.htm#b3)
Nevertheless, at the Tenth Congress of the Communist party, at which this discussion was brought to a close, Lenin himself said that it had been a useless indulgence. And in his autobiography Trotsky said not only that the discussion was beside the real point, but also that it had lost “all meaning” by the time of the congress.
In fact, the whole 1920-21 trade-union discussion occurred within the political context traced out by the program adopted by the Ninth Congress and by war communism, namely the general problems of statization. All the tendencies, from the “group of ten” (Lenin and his supporters, who opposed “a precipitous statization”) to the small “fourth tendency,” known as the “democratic centralism” tendency (which called for the fusion of the unions with the People’s Commissariat of Labor, implemented by Stalin twelve years later, in 1933), argued in a political context dominated by this question of statization. Their differences related to its pace and methods; the principle was not challenged by anyone.
One concrete example illustrates this clearly: At the time of the 1920-21 discussion, compulsory unionization was the rule in the Russian Federated Soviet Socialist Republic. This system had been progressively generalized during the period of war communism. Now, nobody, not even the Workers Opposition, raised the banner against this principle. On the contrary, it is perfectly understandable that the “congress of producers” which, according to this tendency, was to represent the unions and direct the economy would have derived its representative character solely from the compulsory affiliation of all the producers to the unions.
On the other hand, the Eleventh Congress of the Bolshevik party (March 27-April 2, 1922) marked the abandonment of the system of compulsory union affiliation. This was also the congress which sanctioned the right to strike. Much less turbulent than the preceding congress (there were no strong opposition tendencies) [4] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1922/02/tu.htm#b4), it has also been much less closely studied by historians.
In an effort to “bend the stick the other way,” to achieve a sort of “rehabilitation” of the Eleventh Congress, we are publishing below a previously unpublished translation of the speech on the trade-union question delivered at this congress by Leon Trotsky."

[daft punk]

might as well paste the rest of the into:

The importance of the decisions of the Eleventh Congress ought not to be underestimated. It was in the wake of this congress that the Fifth Congress of the trade unions (September 1922) declared itself in favor of workers’ autonomy in collective negotiation, both in the socialist sector and in dealings with the state capitalist sector, that the second labor code of the RFSSR was adopted (November 1922), which recognized trade-union rights, and that a code on civil procedure in the RFSSR was adopted (1923) which granted immunity to the unions’ strike funds.
Some authors believe that the Eleventh Congress confirmed a decline in the influence of the unions.[5] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1922/02/tu.htm#b5) This is an error of assessment which results primarily from a reading of the resolution on the tasks of the unions, in which it was decided to eliminate the unions from direct participation in the management of the enterprises. In reality this decision, far from expressing an ebb in the influence of the unions, was an expression of the new orientation toward making the unions independent of the organs of economic management: One cannot simultaneously participate in management and be in a good position to contest the decisions that are made.
It is this resolution that Trotsky is supporting here, through resolutely backing Lozovsky, an old comrade of Trotsky’s from the newspaper Nashe Slavo and the Interborough Organization. (This support was somewhat unusual in view of the low esteem in which Trotsky held Lozovsky). Trotsky’s intervention was centered on one single problem, the existing relations between economic management on the one hand and trade-union activity on the other. It was not without a certain irony that Trotsky stressed that it was primarily from this standpoint that the resolution of the Tenth Congress, against which he had fought, had proven inadequate. Nor was it without a certain irony that he recalled that at the beginning of 1920 he was the first in the Central Committee to specify the measures which anticipated the economic course initiated with the new economic policy.
But what primarily characterizes Trotsky’s speech is the “angle of attack” from which he approached the trade-union question. His aim, of course, was to eliminate the ambiguities inherent in the positions of the Tenth Congress. There could no longer be any talk of the unions’ participating in the exercise of state functions when the old centralization of economic life was being abolished. The ambiguity therefore had to be removed. How? It is here that the argumentation advanced by Trotsky takes on a particular tone. Although he—unlike the trade unionist Ryazanov—had fully understood what the new trade-union course (oriented toward defense of the interests of the workers) implied for an economy based on hozzascët [ska nog skrivas hozrascet på engelska ] [6] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1922/02/tu.htm#b6) and also understood what this economy meant for the workers, he did not place the emphasis on the “defensive functions” of the unions but instead on necessity and economic effectiveness. Trotsky’s speech aimed not so much at proving that under the new conditions the incorporation of the unions into the state was no longer justified, since they now had to protect the workers, as at proving that the unions ought not to interfere in the economy if the effectiveness of the reform was to be preserved. This angle of attack lends Trotsky’s speech a rather stiff, even formal logical, aspect, a precise counterpart to the position he had taken a year earlier (the state is a workers state, therefore the unions no longer need defend the workers, etc.).
This formal logical aspect is confirmed by the structure of the speech, which develops around the question, “who is right, Lozovsky or Ryazanov, in interpreting the new trade-union policy?” leaving aside the basic problems raised by the speech of Tomsky[7] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1922/02/tu.htm#b7), which Trotsky admitted he had not heard.
Indeed, Trotsky bitingly criticized the position of D. Ryazanov (another ex-comrade of his from Nashe Slavo and the Interborough Organization). Ryazanov, generally close to the positions of Tomsky, the president of the council of unions (they had both been the object of disciplinary sanctions in May 1921), had separated himself from Tomsky in his interventions at the congress. Although all the Bolshevik leaders called for a return to the right to strike, which was regarded as an ultimate anti-bureaucratic guarantee, Ryazanov decided to wage a rear-guard battle, not against this right but against the fact that it was even being discussed. He insisted that this right had never been legally suppressed, that it was a “fundamental right of the working class,” and that his position had never varied since October 26, 1917, when he had convinced the Petrograd council of trade unions to adopt a resolution calling on the workers not to use this right against the new regime.
In his intervention Ryazanov also opposed the return to voluntary trade-union affiliation, calling this the organizational principle of “stab unions.” It was easy for Trotsky: to poke fun at the not very dialectical eternal truths proclaimed by Ryazanov, accusing him of being thoroughly incapable of practically applying the principles of Marxism which he knew so well in theory. One may be astonished at the violence of Trotsky’s criticism of Ryazanov. It must be recalled that at the Tenth Congress the latter had proposed (unsuccessfully) that all elections to the Central Committee on the basis of platforms be prohibited in order to prevent the Central Committee from being elected on the basis of political platforms dealing with secondary questions. (In fact, the trade-union question itself had become “secondary” at that point, and it was Zinoviev who had imposed the election of the CC on a platform basis in order to get rid of some opponents of his.) Trotsky fustigated Ryazanov as the well-intentioned militant who commits blunder after blunder. This is also the explanation for the rather obscure passage referring to the sanction taken against Ryazanov in May 1921, about which a few words must be said, since historians have not always interpreted the events properly.[8] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1922/02/tu.htm#b8)
In May 1921 Ryazanov had gotten the communist “fraction” at the trade-union congress to adopt a resolution in which some of the principles governing the work of communists in the trade-union movement were reaffirmed. In reality, it was only a matter of a document repeating the decisions of the Tenth Congress of the party, insisting on the need to reestablish democratic norms in the unions and on the duty of the party Central Committee to form a stable leading trade-union nucleus that would be capable of directing the unions without the Central Committee having to take these problems up on a daily basis. This resolution, which was adopted by the fraction, was to have been submitted to the trade-union congress, but the Central Committee intervened to annul the fraction’s resolution. Ryazanov was taken out of the union movement and Tomsky was sent on a mission to Turkestan.
The Menshevik historian and trade unionist S. Schwartz has asserted that Ryazanov’s “crime” was to have been “too cynical” in defending the submission of the unions to the party.[9] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1922/02/tu.htm#b9) This interpretation is rather improbable, for it implies that Ryazanov had somehow “gone further” than the decisions of the Tenth Congress of the party. Now, the text of the resolution (as Ryazanov recalled in his own defense at the Eleventh Congress) proves that this was not at all the case. The sanction against Ryazanov was motivated by the fact that the directives of the Tenth Congress were norms elaborated for the party and were not supposed to be imposed on, nor even submitted to a vote by, the trade-union congress.[10] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1922/02/tu.htm#b10)
The time Trotsky devoted to his criticism of Ryazanov appears out of proportion to the importance of the positions being criticized. In spite of the mention of his previous positions, in his speech Trotsky seems not to have wanted to go beyond a limit he had laid down for himself: he did not want to do anything more than “defend and illustrate” the policy of the Political Bureau.
Hence, his positions suffered from the same limits as those of the majority of the party. They lack any reflection on what had to be done to assure that the management apparatuses of the economy would not be even further removed from the workers (apart from the presence behind these apparatuses of a “party worker” increasingly functioning as a deus ex machina ). Also absent is any reflection about the association of the workers with the administration of the economy through channels other than the trade unions. Such reflection, which was at the center of the concerns of the earlier Shliapnikov-Kollontai tendency (although posed in simplistic and unrealistic terms) did not figure among the concerns of the majority of the Bolsheviks in 1922.
Finally, to conclude and sum up, let us note that the positions Trotsky took here were an explicit break with his positions of 1920-21 on the relations of the unions to the Soviet state (trade unions as “economic organs of power,” the “compulsory character” of unionization, which is intended to establish “labor discipline,” exercise “revolutionary repression,” and “discipline” the working class).[11] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1922/02/tu.htm#b11) He was later to describe this as the establishment of a “brutally centralized apparatus . . . created on the basis of trade-union organization. “[12] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1922/02/tu.htm#b12) Nevertheless, this break was relative, given that the change in orientation was justified essentially in light of a theory of stages of transition (stages separated by the “turn” in economic policy), a theory which Ryazanov was ignorant of. This justification limited and strongly down-played the self-critical import of Trotsky’s shift. He remained as we shall I see further on, wedded to the idea of the statization of the unions as a long-term perspective. It was only with the elaboration of his critique of the degeneration of the workers state that he abandoned this idea. But that is another story."



complicated stuff, but a useful bit of background, still hard to understand all the ins and outs without knowing a ton about that period. I think people should be quick not to leap to conclusions.

[Devrim]

Precisely. The revolution went on the ebb.

No, it didn't go on to the ebb. It had already gone onto the ebb. By the time of Trotsky's opposition the revolutionary wave was effectively over. The working class was exhausted and it was too late.


Hmm, not sure about that. You have to bear in mind that in 1921 there was a famine, hardly any industry, and the working class was a tiny % of the population. What they needed were some desperate measures, and democracy was simply an unsuitable luxury at that particular moment.

Revolutions are always going to be made in difficult circumstances. The point is though that a socialist society can not be made without the active participation of the working class. Osinsky put this well as early as February 1918 in a publication of the Petrograd District Committee:


We stand for the construction of the proletarian society by the class creativity of the workers themselves, not by the ukases of the captains of industry. . . if the proletariat itself does not know how to create the necessary prerequisites for the socialist organisation of labour no one can do this for it and no one can compel it to do this. The stick, if raised against the workers, will find itself in the hands of a social force which is either under the influence of another social class or is in the hands of the soviet power; but the soviet power will then be forced to seek support against the proletariat from another class (e.g. the peasantry) and by this it will destroy itself as the dictatorship of the proletariat. Socialism and socialist organisation will be set up by the proletariat itself, or they will not be set up at all - something else will be set up - state capitalism

Lenin at the time called these views "a desertion to the camp of the petty bourgeoisie". In fact Osinky's ideas are well in line with those of Marx on the question "the emancipation of the proletariat is the task of the proletariat itself".


kicked out, not purged, and it was the bourgeois elements, the careerists, the bureaucrats he was getting kicked out of the party. There was still a civil war going on at the time.

The purges of the party not only included "bourgeois elements, the careerists, the bureaucrats" they also included critics from the left of the party and the working class. A well know example would be Gavril Myasnikov, a metal worker, who had joined the party in 1906, and was expelled from the party in 1922, shortly before which he wrote to Lenin:


The trouble is that, while you raise your hand against the capitalist, you deal a blow to the worker. You know very well that for such words as I am now uttering hundreds, perhaps thousands, of workers are languishing in prison. That I myself remain at liberty is only because I am a veteran Communist, have suffered for my beliefs, and am known among the mass of workers. Were it not for this, were I just an ordinary mechanic from the same factory, where would I be now? In a Cheka prison or, more likely, made to 'escape,' just as I made Mikhail Romanov 'escape.' Once more I say: You raise your hand against the bourgeoisie, but it is I who am spitting blood, and it is we, the workers, whose jaws are being cracked.

By the way, the civil war was over by the time of the Tenth Congress.


Yes, easy to say in hindsight, from the comfort of your armchair.

Actually, I am sitting in one of those swivel desk chairs with wheels. Unfortunately it is my girlfriends and set up in a way that I don't find particularly comfortable. Seriously though what sort of an argument is this? You should be embarrassed by it.


Even the anarchists, who can be very biassed and misinformed, agree that Russia was a democracy in 1918.

I think you will find that anarchists made many criticisms of the situation in Russian in 1918, perhaps unsurprisingly as the leading anarchosyndicalist paper, 'Golos Truda', was closed down in May 1918.


The Workers Opposition were sort of suppressed

Do you mean 'sort of suppressed' in the way that Trotsky 'sort of' got murdered by a ice pick. There was no sort of about it. Factions were banned in the party. It was not an event without precedence though. Left opposition factions had been banned within the party as early as April 1918, less than 6 months after the revolution.

The suppression of factions within the party, and its bureaucratization were not things that happened suddenly with Lenin's death and the rise of Stalin, but a process which had begun long before that and one in which both Lenin and Trotsky had played their roles.

Devrim

[daft punk]

No, it didn't go on to the ebb. It had already gone onto the ebb. By the time of Trotsky's opposition the revolutionary wave was effectively over. The working class was exhausted and it was too late.

Maybe




Revolutions are always going to be made in difficult circumstances. The point is though that a socialist society can not be made without the active participation of the working class. Osinsky put this well as early as February 1918 in a publication of the Petrograd District Committee:
"Originally Posted by Osinsky
We stand for the construction of the proletarian society by the class creativity of the workers themselves, not by the ukases of the captains of industry. . . if the proletariat itself does not know how to create the necessary prerequisites for the socialist organisation of labour no one can do this for it and no one can compel it to do this. The stick, if raised against the workers, will find itself in the hands of a social force which is either under the influence of another social class or is in the hands of the soviet power; but the soviet power will then be forced to seek support against the proletariat from another class (e.g. the peasantry) and by this it will destroy itself as the dictatorship of the proletariat. Socialism and socialist organisation will be set up by the proletariat itself, or they will not be set up at all - something else will be set up - state capitalism "

Hmm. He says the stick IF raised against the workers. So he doesnt seem to be saying it is. Lenin himself said similar stuff around the same time.
"One of the most important tasks today, if not the most important, is to develop this independent initiative of the workers, and of all the working and exploited people generally, develop it as widely as possible in creative organisational work. At all costs we must break the old, absurd, savage, despicable and disgusting prejudice that only the so-called "upper classes", only the rich, and those who have gone through the school of the rich, are capable of administering the state and directing the organisational development of socialist society."





Lenin at the time called these views "a desertion to the camp of the petty bourgeoisie". In fact Osinky's ideas are well in line with those of Marx on the question "the emancipation of the proletariat is the task of the proletariat itself".

I need supporting evidence for a claim like this. Yes I agree those views seemed in line with Marx.





The purges of the party not only included "bourgeois elements, the careerists, the bureaucrats" they also included critics from the left of the party and the working class. A well know example would be Gavril Myasnikov, a metal worker, who had joined the party in 1906, and was expelled from the party in 1922, shortly before which he wrote to Lenin:

Originally Posted by Gavril Myasnikov
The trouble is that, while you raise your hand against the capitalist, you deal a blow to the worker. You know very well that for such words as I am now uttering hundreds, perhaps thousands, of workers are languishing in prison. That I myself remain at liberty is only because I am a veteran Communist, have suffered for my beliefs, and am known among the mass of workers. Were it not for this, were I just an ordinary mechanic from the same factory, where would I be now? In a Cheka prison or, more likely, made to 'escape,' just as I made Mikhail Romanov 'escape.' Once more I say: You raise your hand against the bourgeoisie, but it is I who am spitting blood, and it is we, the workers, whose jaws are being cracked.

Hard for me to give an answer to this. On the face of it it sounds bad. He was expelled from the CP in 1922. He formed a group opposing the NEP. He did end up in jail in 1923. I'm not sure why Trotsky didnt join with people like that in 1923.

here is a letter Lenin wrote to him, it is worth reading
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/aug/05.htm

he wanted freedom of the press for the bourgeois, Lenin called that suicide.




By the way, the civil war was over by the time of the Tenth Congress.

The Kronstadt mutiny took place at the time, this was backed by whites etc, so is sorta still part of the civil war. Wikipedia lists the civil war as 1917-23.




Actually, I am sitting in one of those swivel desk chairs with wheels. Unfortunately it is my girlfriends and set up in a way that I don't find particularly comfortable. Seriously though what sort of an argument is this? You should be embarrassed by it.

No, why should I? I am simply saying that we were not there, it is very hard to put ourselves in the position of Lenin and Trotsky, the decisions that had to make. They both wanted communism, exactly the same as left coms, even anarchists. They did not do these harsh things lightly.




I think you will find that anarchists made many criticisms of the situation in Russian in 1918, perhaps unsurprisingly as the leading anarchosyndicalist paper, 'Golos Truda', was closed down in May 1918.

According to wikipedia it was closed down in 1921. However they were not fully repressed until 1929.

Maybe a good idea to see what Victor Serge had to say, he was an anarchist who joined the Bolsheviks, sometimes criticised them, and later wrote a bio of Trotsky with his widow.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/serge/1930/year-one-ni/part09.html

Victor Serge

Year One of the Russian Revolution

IX – Suppression of the Anarchists



"The famine was so great that at Tsarskoye-Selo, not far from Petrograd, the population received only one hundred grams of bread a day. There were disturbances, with shouts of “Long live the Constituent Assembly!” and even “Long live Nicholas II!” on April 6 and 7. On April 19 there were “hunger riots” at Smolensk, “fomented” (?) by Anarchists. In April, entry into overpopulated and exhausted Samara was forbidden."

"It was under these conditions that the Anarchists were disarmed during the night of August 11."

"The Bolshevik Party treated their organizations as equals. They had a large daily paper in Moscow, Anarchy. The libertarian syndicalist paper in Petrograd, Golos Truda (Workers’ Voice) which disputed the influence of Pravda for a time, only disappeared when its editors fell out over the question of revolutionary war. Volin, the editor-in-chief, and his friends abandoned propaganda for partisan guerrilla warfare, and went to the front, where they were useless."

"Anarchy, edited by the Gordin brothers, devoted itself to feverish propaganda, exclusively idealistic and demagogic, which took account of absolutely no reality. Let us look over several numbers of this sheet for April 1918. Remember that we are on the eve of the collapse of anarchism in the Russian Revolution; after April 12 it no longer existed.
“We are against the soviets in principle,” wrote the Gordin brothers on April 7, “as we are against all states.”
“They say we are plotting to overthrow the Bolsheviks. Absurd! We were even opposed to overthrowing the Mensheviks.”
From the same on April 10:
“We considered and still consider the seizure of power a fatal error ... but we fought in the front ranks in October.”
“We are threatened, but we are quite calm. We cannot perish, for great things never perish.”"


"In Moscow alone the Anarchist forces, which were divided into a multitude of groups, sub-groups, factions, and sub-factions, varying all the way from individualism to syndicalism, passing through communism and not a few fantastic new isms, amounted to several thousand men, for the most part armed. In this period of famine, the sincere demagogy of the libertarian propagandists found not a little support among the backward elements of the population.

The Black General Staff: State Within the State

A Black General Staff directed these forces, which formed a sort of armed state – irresponsible, uncontrolled, and uncontrollable – within the state. The Anarchists themselves admitted that suspected elements, adventurers, common-law criminals, and counter-revolutionists found a refuge among them, as Anarchist principle did not allow them to close their organizations to anyone nor exercise any real control over anyone. They understood clearly the necessity for purging their groups, but this was impossible without either authority or disciplined organization. The diversity and inviolabilitv of their principles gradually led to the political suicide of the movement, which every day found itself more compromised."


and so on, worth a read.






Do you mean 'sort of suppressed' in the way that Trotsky 'sort of' got murdered by a ice pick. There was no sort of about it. Factions were banned in the party. It was not an event without precedence though. Left opposition factions had been banned within the party as early as April 1918, less than 6 months after the revolution.

The suppression of factions within the party, and its bureaucratization were not things that happened suddenly with Lenin's death and the rise of Stalin, but a process which had begun long before that and one in which both Lenin and Trotsky had played their roles.

Devrim

No I dont mean ice picks through their heads, several became members of the Central Committee and Kollantai became an important diplomat, in fact she survived Stalin which was a miracle. Many of them joined Trotsky's Left Opposition.

Last word to Victor Serge

"In disarming the Anarchists, the Bo1sheviks – and the S-Rs who at least gave tacit consent to the maneuver – merely obeyed the imperious necessity for protecting the rear of the revolution. Could the revolution tolerate uncontrollable Anarchist strongholds, behind its front lines? The formation of the Red Army opened a long period of struggle between the guerrilla hands and the organizers of the regular troops. We shall return to this struggle."

[Omsk]

And what do you care? You have made zero comments on the OP.


Why are you so hostile toward me in this example?I see no clear reason for such behaviour,and your note was not true,my post to which you replied was directly involved with this issue and the subject of the debate.


They didnt get enough support because they represented revolution and Stalin represented counter-revolution
No,they simply were not that popular,and the mass nor the educated workers actually supported them.



Also there is the fact that people who supported Trotsky lost their jobs, couldnt get jobs, were denied medical treatment, were intimidated, blackmailed, driven to suicide, not allowed to speak and so on. There was a massive media campaign of lies. Opposition meetings were attacked by hooligans blowing whistles, fascist style. Opposition members couldnt speak anywhere. They were treated as criminals.


No proof for these claims,and no actual argument,plus,many people aknowledge that the Opposition had certain freedoms,unlike some people claim,for an example:


But during the 1920s the Stalinist leadership had often permitted the publication of statements and articles by various oppositionists within the party, at least until the moment of their defeat and expulsion. Trotsky's works were published until the mid-1920s, and Bukharin continued to publish, howbeit within controlled parameters, until his arrest in 1937; he was in fact editor of the government newspaper Izvestia until that time. [Stalin had personally nominated Bukharin to the Izvestia position in 1934]
Getty & Naumov. The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 103

For an example,the anti-Stalin historian Roy Medvedev also notes such details:

Actually Trotsky wanted to try another test of strength with the Politburo. It seemed to him that the mood in the party had shifted in his favor. Dozens of oppositionists who came to see him at the offices of the Chief Concessions Committee assured him that this was so. Thus Trotsky decided on a renewal of factional political activity, which was conducted on a large scale and attracted more supporters than in the fall of 1926. The opposition groups in the various Soviet cities had their own local leaderships and their own faction discipline, and dues were collected from members. Opposition materials were published secretly on government printing presses, and a small illegal print shop was set up in Moscow for the same purpose. Trotsky knew about, and fully approved of, the use of such prerevolutionary conspiratorial methods. Assessing these events several years later, Trotsky wrote:
"In a very short time it was apparent that as a faction we had undoubtedly gained strength--that is to say, we had grown more united intellectually, and stronger in numbers...."
In this passage Trotsky obviously exaggerates the extent of Opposition influence among rank-and-file party members. He overstates even more the extent to which Stalin had been discredited by the Chinese events. Moreover, most of the illegal meetings and Opposition materials were no secret to Stalin and his immediate circle. He followed the activities of the opposition leaders very closely.
Medvedev, Roy. Let History Judge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 171

And we should also note that the Right-Opposition was active too,not just the Trotskyist Left-Opposition.

[A Marxist Historian]

There's an error in every paragraph, nearly every sentence, of the posting below, and I am not momentarily in the mood to write a giant posting chopping it to pieces.

So I'll just stick to where you go furthest out onto a limb and then saw it off your very own self.

Just what is this overwhelming evidence for your fantasy that the Americans were supporting Lenin and Trotsky? That the Americans gave Trotsky a passport? Why on earth wouldn't they, he had every right to one, as a citizen of a country allied with the USA. Especially since Woodrow Wilson's famous "Fourteen Points" to end WWI were directly cribbed from a pamphlet by Trotsky. This means no more than the fact that the Germans let Lenin buy a train ticket through Russia (and Menshevik leader Martov too).

What it meant is that the capitalists usually don't break their own rules and violate democratic principles when they have no need to.

So lets see your indisputable evidence for this crazy fantasy. My guess is the mutterings of some paranoid 9-11 conspiracy freak or other.

-M.H.-


@Daft Punk... Did you get the PM I sent? I don't know if I am allowed yet and it didn't appear in my sent folder. Let me know and maybe I can figure a way to get it to you(I saved it) I will wait to see and only briefly touch on some of the points you brought up.

First, let me address the point I tried to make (second from top of your last post). I think you have misunderstood my point. I am simply saying that I could address the Stalinist's who are too pro-Stalin in the same way. It is about the thought distortions and has nothing to do with the men in particular. All people do it and it is simply a human characteristic that a researcher or someone interested in getting to the truth or facts must be careful not to engage in because it is the seed of self deception. I am not trying to place any value on either Trotsky or Stalin or anything like that.



He killed all the socialists in Russia, fact.

At the same time he deliberately sabotaged the revolution in Spain, fact.

After WW2 the stated policy of the Stalinists was to stop socialist revolutions, fact.

Did they mean it? Hard to say but many of their actions fit in with the stated policy.

Too much to go into here. This thread is really about the period 1924-8.

Note words in red. These are what are referred to in technical terms as thought distortions(in the psychology field). I will add a link about thought distortions for you but in short this amounts to a difficulty sorting fact from feeling at some point. All humans do it, even myself, so don't let the term, some interpretation of it, or my mentioning it, seem accusatory. This is what I meant above too(in reference to the Stalinists). We build our beliefs off of facts and feelings but feelings taken as fact leads to a distortion of the analysis. It also makes communication of ideas more difficult and leads to many misunderstandings or worse.

http://psychcentral.com/lib/2009/15-common-cognitive-distortions/

Now note the blue words. These are the conclusions you have made. Since it is plainly obvious, due to the survivors of the Stalin era that exist physically, to this day, this cannot be a fact in the case of the first sentence. It is a thought distortion and though it sounds impressive and convincing to some, it is not very convincing to critical thinkers. Pay attention Comrade because I am trying to put the power in your hands and make you a even more powerful tool of Marxism and a more effective debater. Passionate belief you have in spades.

In the second sentence you are establishing this how? How do you deduce this was deliberate as opposed to an unintended outcome? Maybe there is a smoking gun but nothing that I have seen or read is even remotely close. You are trying to establish a motive when it is impossible. You cannot assume to know Stalin's motive. At best you can say he stated this(fact) or that he stated this and then hope he wasn't lying or playing politics at the time, but you cannot know his feelings at all.

In the third sentence, I have only highlighted the word 'fact' due to the potential for the first part of the sentence turning out to be a thought distortion. I have not read the policy but I am willing to go out on a limb and say they didn't actually state that their literal goal was to "stop socialist revolutions" even if this appears to be the outcome of said policy. I expect this will turn out to be a interpretation not a actual fact. Consider this, and the blue word 'fact' has been potentially misapplied. This is more a matter of potential on this sentence but I would need to read the policy itself to verify or refute this.

I have no real objection to the fourth sentence or the fifth. The blue is only there to show that you already know in your subconscious what I am saying to you. You really are being candid there; but I am not well versed enough in the said policy to comment one way or the other so I will refrain from doing so now. Hint hint... psst psst can you pass me a link brother? Either way this is secondary to the bigger issue but I do want to learn about it and I know you have done a whole lot of research and want to share it with me. Believe me, I am reading as many links as I have the time for.

When did the US support Lenin and Trotsky? When did they support Mao? From 1945-8 Mao was fighting the KMT and Stalin and America were both backing the KMT.

The US government facilitated Trotsky's re-entry into Europe and Russia by issuing him an American passport. Lenin used US businessmens capital to establish a government. All the while knowing, through it's spying, that he was a revolutionary who aimed to overthrow the Russian government. A government who was their ally at the time. Mao was supported by the US, during WWII and after for several years, just like they did Chaing Kai Shek and Ho Chi Minh against the Japanese during the war. The OSS agent, through whom the US gov dealt with Ho Chi Minh during the war, even warned the higher ups at the OSS, that if we ignored him he would 'turn against us'.

Stalin's support of the KMT is JUST as unexplainable as the US support of Mao that even had Congressmen and officials denying before a committee that Mao was even a Communist but instead a 'agrarian reformer' and therefore deserved of our continued support beyond the fight against Japan. I cannot give you the exact amount of years but I can say that their support of Mao was more than the little over two years Stalin supported the KMT in the post war era. Now you ask what does this mean. My point is and has always been that it has many possibilities and may be indeterminable due to politics.

And just because America does (so you claim, I await the evidence) strange things like that doesn't mean that a socialist would have any good reason to back a capitalist army against a supposedly socialist one. If there was, what was it?

The evidence is there and that is beyond dispute. Simply put it was mutually beneficial at the time and nothing in this world is simply black and white but various shades of grey. My point is we cannot just haphazardly jump to conclusions that fit a idea when there are few facts to work with.

Yet as Marxist's we shouldn't be blind or naive to the fact that the capitalists will support anyone, or anything, if they can profit from it one way or another. None of this makes Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Trotsky or even Stalin a questionable or un-dedicated Marxist just because we do not have all of the facts that they had at their disposal before deciding to strategically align their selves with an enemy at that time. Those things tend to be kept secret, or lied about, by bureaucratic establishments, no matter the flavor, to protect the interest they are working for. In the case of Marxists they tend to be working toward their idea of how to achieve Marxism and I have to give the benefit of the doubt until it is proven otherwise. To not do so is to engage in intellectual dishonesty even if this is not the intent.

All this really shows factually is that a, odd, seemingly contradictory, yet mutually beneficial, relationship existed at some point. To attempt to establish or discern a motive to some link, like the ones above, in order to meet another agenda is an error if the facts do not support it. And by facts, I do mean actual empirical facts beyond someone halfway around the world, and without the full details that the actual person(making the decision) had in their hands, making unverified claims to serve their own purpose. More times than not, this is propaganda of some form. It is also opportunism at it's worst. This is regardless of whether it is Stalin, Trotsky, or Jane Doe the book writer and historian doing the writing. This leads to great and exciting reading but does little to clarify the real situation unless they use actual facts to support it.

Research for you. I've spent years researching it.

Research for anyone who seeks truth, enlightenment, and understanding unless you think you are through with research and have it all sorted out and nothing new to learn or study. I don't think you feel you are done with research but that could be implied from the above. I know you have spent years researching it but you will spend many more years doing so and on your death bed you will come to the realization that you never had enough time to do enough research. In fact I want to know the very facts that are in your head and that is valuable information but you will never be done researching and reformulating unless you are content with being somewhat in the dark or possibly outright wrong.

Trotsky was killed by Ramon Mercader. Declassified documents show he was NKVD. Stalin presented him with a medal while he was in jail and when he got out the KGB gave him another one.

It would appearthat way according to many writers from the anti-stalinsit camp and this includes Sudaplatov when you consider he did 15 years before making these statements. I don't see that it matters, you don't throw the baby out with the dirty bathwater, and Stalin made valuable contributions and even valuable mistakes that we can now learn from once we stop siding up in old feuds and see it for what it was. This requires dismissing non-factual or non-verifiable evidence and sticking to fact and fact supported interpretations. The same could be said for the Stalinist camp in regard to Trotsky but I am dealing with you because I see a boat load of intellectual potential awaiting actual realization. Simply put stop limiting yourself old boy because you are far to valuable to the cause. You remind me of myself not so long ago.

I dunno if one or two capitalists saw a reason to back Lenin and Trotsky. The fact is that capitalism in general was extremely hostile to them, fought a war against them and implemented an economic blockade.

Spot on. I couldn't agree with you more. They used every tool and every person they could to destroy it and profit while it was alive and still kicking. My point was we cannot just guess at their motives or use circumstantial evidence to establish a serious view of their motives. They used the imperialists(there were more than one or two involved) and the imperialists sought to get over on them. Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky all fought this tooth and nail in the USSR. Yet they needed financial backing and this amount was enough to get the USSR started and enabled it to weather several stormy years. The ends justified the means. Lenin and Stalin were both willing to crack a few eggs to make a omelet because they were practical and not unrealistically idealistic. For this some refer to them as right wing.

Look, Stalin purged a million from the CP. He sabotaged the revolution in Spain. He killed all the old Bolsheviks. He Killed 10,000 Trotskyists. He killed their families. It's all historical fact. Go and study it. Stalin ran a one man dictatorship and he launched the purge so he is responsible for all the deaths. Look at the big picture, read my links, dont waste your time with dodgy theories, look at the most obvious one first. Stalin was scared of revolution from below to establish genuine democratic socialism. So he was scared of Trotsky and Trotskyists. His purges lasted over 10 years. In fact they went on from 1926 to 1953 really, but obviously peaked in the mid 30s.

I actually tried to look into that last night which is where I came across Sudaplatov(I think that is right but Gramsci Guy mentioned him earlier). I honestly think there is more to it than we can ever know and I am also very well versed in modern European history and know most of the accusations with the exception of Trotsky's family. I am unimpressed with the historical narrative on Stalin. Meaning; facts are scarce and legend and myth are in abundance. I do not like to rely on testimony unless it is supported by concrete facts. You would have an easier time comprehending the Holy Ascension than sorting out that mess. So why bother?

Just study it with as much objectivity, meaning stop taking sides, as you possibly can. You have not demonstrated enough objectivity, even when you mentioned Anthony Beevor in another thread, to really justify any other take than to study it as best you can objectively. The best you will do is separate the BS from the real lessons but you will never be able to establish much else from that mess. It is shrouded in myth. History is that way and trust me when I tell you I know a thing or two about history. There is a reason courts require more than just eyewitness testimony to convict a man of murder(testimony of Stalin's enemies or Trotsky would not be given enough significance or weight to convict). It is unreliable. To base your belief on that is the scientific equivalent of 'conspiracy theory'.

Where do you get that idea from? And if they werent killed, what happened to them?

Did I not say that they happened? The deaths I mean? At least as far as I know anyway. According to one account on one of his son's I believe it was, it is believed and reported, that one son died in a GULAG riot and uprising. That very well could be the case. Or it could have been Stalin himself with a big shiny blade. Or it could be aliens from outer space but in reality I find it irrelevant unless you plan to put him on trial. If not, get over it, and without taking sides look at it from a factual standpoint, not one composed of hearsay, in order to make an overall assessment of his strengths and weaknesses, successes and failures. No matter what you do you shouldn't bog down in the unverifiable nonsense, true or not, that hides the real Stalin or Trotsky for that matter. Otherwise you end up with a caricature rather than a honest appraisal. Caricature's, like good stories, are entertaining but do little to help us learn the facts.

Stalin knew the score, Trotsky's organisation was heavily penetrated by NKVD.

So why the need for all the attempts if his group was so heavily penetrated and the NKVD was in such close contact? Why so many ugly high profile botched attempts when it could have been neat and clean with poison? Could it be that he lived until 1940 because Stalin didn't want him dead at that time if at all? It seemed a easy task for the NKVD so why all the delay and failure? Why look so incompetent when it appears the access was there for a quite and efficient assassination? We end up with more questions than answers unless we seek a oversimplified answer.

Trotsky never said he was the only one who could create socialism, where do you get that idea from?

I was actually referring to Stalin but Trotsky certainly seemed to be suggesting he could do it better did he not?

It was not a battle of egos it was Marxists vs anti-Marxists. Revolution vs anti-revolution.

This is certainly how both Stalin and Trotsky wanted it to be viewed but is it? It really was, on both accounts, a matter of my Marxism is right and yours is wrong. People are people and both Trotsky and Stalin were human. The primary difference was that Stalin had close to 300 million people that he was responsible for in an official capacity and Trotsky need only account for himself and his family which didn't leave with him for exile. At least not all of them.

I am objective. You need to research this. You need to see that Stalin led a political counter-revolution against socialism. Then when someone says to you communism is rubbish, look at Russia, you can explain to them that Stalinism happened because the revolution was isolated in a backward country, and was a counter-revolution.

I am researching it and you are helping me to do so Comrade. I truly thank you for that and for your time as well. Please understand that I am attempting to reciprocate the favor in my own way.

I need to see it without attaching myself to one party or the other. Otherwise I am a subscriber not a thinker.

When someone says Communism is rubbish, or communism failed, all I have to say is it has never been tried and it has never been seen before with human eyes. All we saw was a 'Workers state' and I do not need to use Trotsky or any other complicated long winded theory to justify an idea that hasn't ever been realized in this world. That line of thinking, used by Trotsky and later Krushchev, didn't work. It didn't convince enough people for us to keep using it in the hopes to sway the masses or to argue a moot point. Learn from history or it will repeat it's self.

I hope you see my point on this last bit. We don't have to defend an idea that was never tried or realized just because someone wants us to feel the need to do so. Think about that for a minute my friend. Take care and I will talk to you tomorrow.:)

[A Marxist Historian]

(on Myasnikov)

Hard for me to give an answer to this. On the face of it it sounds bad. He was expelled from the CP in 1922. He formed a group opposing the NEP. He did end up in jail in 1923. I'm not sure why Trotsky didnt join with people like that in 1923.

here is a letter Lenin wrote to him, it is worth reading
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/aug/05.htm

he wanted freedom of the press for the bourgeois, Lenin called that suicide...

Myasnikov, as the quote hints, was the guy actually in charge of killing the Romanovs, including the Romanov children. He got burned by the experience, did a flip flop. Lenin's letter to Myasnikov is definitely worth reading, an excellent statement.

After both of them were in exile from the USSR, Myasnikov dropped in on Trotsky in 1929 I think it was, and could not, unsurprisingly, come to an agreement. Trotsky wrote an article about this, called "Forgetful Myasnikov." It's somewhere in an early volume of Trotsky's Collected Works.

And oh yes, Osinsky. He capitulated to Stalin so thoroughly that he was still on the Central Committee of the CPSU(b) as late as February 1937! Holding down important posts too. He got shot only a few weeks before the Great Golgotha of the Great Purge got going, in which not just former oppositionists, but some 9/10ths of the loyal Stalinists in the top party leadership were murdered by Stalin.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

...
Do you mean 'sort of suppressed' in the way that Trotsky 'sort of' got murdered by a ice pick. There was no sort of about it. Factions were banned in the party. It was not an event without precedence though. Left opposition factions had been banned within the party as early as April 1918, less than 6 months after the revolution.

The suppression of factions within the party, and its bureaucratization were not things that happened suddenly with Lenin's death and the rise of Stalin, but a process which had begun long before that and one in which both Lenin and Trotsky had played their roles.
Devrim

Factions banned in 1918? Very far from the truth. Bukharin's Left Communists weren't banned, they just dissolved, when some of their demands, notably immediate nationalization of heavy industry and cranking up the Red Terror, were satisfied in the summer of 1918.

In Ukraine, the great homeland of factionalism, the Left Communists were in charge until the first Soviet Ukrainian republic collapsed that summer, and factional warfare continued uninterruptedly thereafter for years to come, basically ending only when Rakovsky was removed as the Soviet leader in the summer of 1923.

The faction ban in the spring of 1921 was originally intended as a temporary measure for a desperate situation, what with Kronstadt and much of the countryside up in arms against "war communism," demanding that partial return to capitalism which was indeed granted with the NEP. A communist party compelled to take pro-capitalist measures by pressure from the masses is in a very peculiar and unpleasant situation.

Whether the ban on factions was a good idea at that moment or not is something I, personally, am undecided about, there are arguments both ways. What is true is that it went on too long, and indeed was the formal precedent for Stalinism.

It only became permanent after Lenin died and Zinoviev and Stalin baptised it as "basic principle of Bolshevism," which they could not have done with him still alive.

When Lenin and Trotsky tried to implement it by expelling the Workers Opposition leaders from the Central Committee in 1922, they were outvoted, and the measure failed! A mistake on their part IMHO, I don't think the ban was necessary any more by then. This had a lot to do with Lenin's blunder of going along with Zinoviev's bright idea of making Stalin the disciplinarian the General Secretary. An idea Lenin started regretting almost from the day Stalin took office.

-M.H.-

[Devrim]

Maybe

No, there is no 'maybe' about it. The revolutionary wave had ebbed by 1923. Now, of course it is a lot easier to judge this is retrospect than it would have been at the time. Nevertheless, I think that it was quite clear at the time too, and many communists had remarked upon it. The fact remains though that by the time Trotsky began his opposition the working class had lost the initiative both in Russia and across Europe as a whole, and that during the revolutionary wave whilst there was still dynamism within both the Communist Parties, and the class as a whole Trotsky had stood against that.


Hmm. He says the stick IF raised against the workers. So he doesnt seem to be saying it is.

But do you really think he was raising it just as an abstract possibility of something that might happen in the future, and it had no connection with events that were taking place at the time? Remember this is in early 1918, a full five years before the beginnings of Trotsky's opposition.


I need supporting evidence for a claim like this.

I would suggest that you read your Lenin then. The key text on these events is 'Left-wing Childishness and the Petite-bourgeois Mentality' (n.b. this is not a mistake. It is a separate pamphlet to the more well know one).


Hard for me to give an answer to this. On the face of it it sounds bad. He was expelled from the CP in 1922. He formed a group opposing the NEP. He did end up in jail in 1923. I'm not sure why Trotsky didnt join with people like that in 1923.

People like this did try to make common cause with Trotsky in 1923. The original Left Opposition was not Trotskyist in the way we understand it today, but also included others more to the left of Trotsky. This despite the fact that previously Trotsky had been one of those most active against the oppositions within the party.


he wanted freedom of the press for the bourgeois, Lenin called that suicide.

As he replied to Lenin's letter:


You say that I want freedom of the press for the bourgeoisie. On the contrary, I want freedom of the press for myself, a proletarian, a member of the party for fifteen years


]The Kronstadt mutiny took place at the time, this was backed by whites etc, so is sorta still part of the civil war. Wikipedia lists the civil war as 1917-23.

Firstly on the question of the Civil War, the same Wikipedia article says:


In Soviet historiography (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_historiography) the period of the Civil War has traditionally been defined as 1918–21, but the war's skirmishes actually stretched from 1917–23.

The civil war was effectively over in November 1920.

That the Kronstadt mutiny was backed by the Whites is quite a controversial statement. As you put it earlier "I need supporting evidence for a claim like this".


According to wikipedia it was closed down in 1921. However they were not fully repressed until 1929.

1921 is still two years before Trotsky's opposition began, but if you look at the Wiki page on the subject you will find it says:


After the suppression of the Golos Truda by the Bolshevik government in August 1918, Maximov, Nikolai Dolenko (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nikolai_Dolenko&action=edit&redlink=1) and Efim Yartchuk (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Efim_Yartchuk&action=edit&redlink=1) established Volny Golos Truda (The Free Voice of Labour).[1] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golos_Truda#cite_note-iisg-0)[19] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golos_Truda#cite_note-18) At the 10th Congress of the Russian Communist Party (b) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10th_Congress_of_the_Russian_Communist_Party_%28b% 29) in March 1921, Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Lenin) declared war against the petite bourgeoisie (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petite_bourgeoisie), and in particular the anarcho-syndicalists, with immediate consequences; the Cheka (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheka) closed the publishing and printing premises of Golos Truda in Petrograd, as well as the paper's bookstore in Moscow, where all but half a dozen anarchists had been arrested.[17] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golos_Truda#cite_note-living_my_life_p.887-16)Despite the banning of their paper, the Golos Truda group continued on, however, and issued a final edition in the form of a journal, in Petrograd and Moscow in December 1919.


No I dont mean ice picks through their heads, several became members of the Central Committee and Kollantai became an important diplomat, in fact she survived Stalin which was a miracle. Many of them joined Trotsky's Left Opposition.

I didn't say that they got icepicks through the head. I was contesting your use of the words 'sort of', as in "sort of suppressed". Of course many capitulated, as did many Trotskyists. Many died in Stalin's prisons too.

Devrim

[Devrim]

Myasnikov, as the quote hints, was the guy actually in charge of killing the Romanovs, including the Romanov children. He got burned by the experience, did a flip flop. Lenin's letter to Myasnikov is definitely worth reading, an excellent statement.

This is completely incorrect. Myasnikov was not responsible for killing the Romanov children. He was responsible for killing the Tzar's brother Grand Duke Michael nor did he do a 'flip-flop' as you put it, but was still active in communist politics until his death by execution in 1945.




And oh yes, Osinsky. He capitulated to Stalin so thoroughly that he was still on the Central Committee of the CPSU(b) as late as February 1937! Holding down important posts too. He got shot only a few weeks before the Great Golgotha of the Great Purge got going, in which not just former oppositionists, but some 9/10ths of the loyal Stalinists in the top party leadership were murdered by Stalin.

Would the fact that he had later capitulated make what he said in 1918 wrong? I think (but am not 100% certain) that they are different V.Osinky's anyway though.

Devrim

[Devrim]

Factions banned in 1918? Very far from the truth. Bukharin's Left Communists weren't banned, they just dissolved, when some of their demands, notably immediate nationalization of heavy industry and cranking up the Red Terror, were satisfied in the summer of 1918.

Again this is factually untrue. In April 1918, an emergency session of the Petrograd Party,produced a majority for Lenin and "demanded that the adherents of Kommunist cease their separate organisational existence".

Devrim

[daft punk]

Originally Posted by Omsk http://www.revleft.com/vb/revleft/buttons/viewpost.gif (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?p=2378527#post2378527)
"If we are to look from a non-sectarian perspective,the Left-Oppositon completely failed in their attempts to gain popular support and to actually try to bring about the end of the people they were fighting against.Too few people,not enough acts and deeds and too much unreasonable decissions and proposals in the past

Maybe the Trotskyite factions in the 21st century will learn from their mistakes. "

Why are you so hostile toward me in this example?I see no clear reason for such behaviour,and your note was not true,my post to which you replied was directly involved with this issue and the subject of the debate.

Because you are trying to sound objective when in fact you support the murder of all the left opposition, the lies, the frameups, the political counter-revolution. And what you say is vague, wrong, and meaningless. The fact is that at the time Trotsky was failing to get popular support there were reasons beyond his control as I have clearly explained.






"They didnt get enough support because they represented revolution and Stalin represented counter-revolution "
No,they simply were not that popular,and the mass nor the educated workers actually supported them.

Simply not popular, for no reason whatsoever! Such a profound Marxist, materialist analysis! NOT!! Do you even know what Marxism basically is?

Consciousness is determined by material conditions. The conditions were exhaustion after 10 years of war and civil war, poverty, famine, and then to top it all the defeat of the Chinese revolution (thanks to Stalin). Plus it was a backward country, and isolated.

Marx:

"this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced"

Never mind the repression associated with supporting the opposition.





"Also there is the fact that people who supported Trotsky lost their jobs, couldnt get jobs, were denied medical treatment, were intimidated, blackmailed, driven to suicide, not allowed to speak and so on. There was a massive media campaign of lies. Opposition meetings were attacked by hooligans blowing whistles, fascist style. Opposition members couldnt speak anywhere. They were treated as criminals. "
No proof for these claims,and no actual argument,plus,many people aknowledge that the Opposition had certain freedoms,unlike some people claim,for an example:


I can provide plenty of proof. This was the start of a one-man dictatorship which ended in 10,000 Trotskists shot in the Gulag.

"The nearer drew the time for the fifteenth congress, set for the end of 1927, the more the party felt that it had reached a crossroads in history. Alarm was rife in the ranks. In spite of a monstrous terror, the desire to hear the opposition awoke in the party. This could be achieved only by illegal means. Secret meetings were held in various parts of Moscow and Leningrad, attended by workers and students of both sexes, who gathered in groups of from twenty to one hundred and two hundred to hear some representative of the opposition. In one day I would visit two, three, and sometimes four of such meetings. They were usually held in some worker’s apartment. Two small rooms would be packed with people, and the speaker would stand at the door between the two rooms. Sometimes every one would sit on the floor; more often the discussion had to be carried on stand big, for lack of space. Occasionally representatives of the Control Commission would appear at such meetings and demand that everyone leave. They were invited to take part in the discussion. If they caused any disturbance they were put out. In all, about 20,000 people attended such meetings in Moscow and Leningrad. The number was growing. The opposition cleverly prepared a huge meeting in the hall of the High Technical School, which had been occupied from within. The hall was crammed with two thousand people, while a huge crowd remained outside in the street. The attempts of the administration to stop the meeting proved ineffectual. Kamenev and I spoke for about two hours. Finally the Central Committee issued an appeal to the workers to break up the meetings of the opposition by force. This appeal was merely a screen for carefully prepared attacks on the opposition by military units under the guidance of the GPU. Stalin wanted a bloody settlement of the conflict. We gave the signal for a temporary discontinuance of the large meetings. But this was not until after the demonstration of November 7. In October of 1927, the Central Executive Committee held its session in Leningrad. In honor of the occasion, the authorities staged a mass demonstration. But through an unforeseen circumstance, the demonstration took an entirely unexpected turn. Zinoviev and I and a few others of the opposition were making the rounds of the city by automobile, to see the size and temper of the demonstration. Toward the end of our drive, we approached the Taurid Palace where motor-trucks were drawn up as platforms for the members of the Central Executive Committee. Our automobile stopped short before a line of police; there was no farther passage. Before we could make up our minds how to get out of the impasse, the commander hurried to our car and quite guilelessly offered to escort us to the platform. Before we could overcome our hesitation, two lines of police opened a way for us to the last motor-truck, which was still unoccupied. When the masses learned that we were on the last platform, the character of the demonstration changed instantly. The people began to pass by the first trucks indifferently, with out even answering the greetings from them, and hurried on to our platform. Soon a bank of thousands of people had been formed around our truck. Workers and soldiers halted, looked up, shouted their greetings, and then were obliged to move on because of the impatient pressure of those behind them. A platoon of police which was sent to our truck to restore order was itself caught up by the general mood, and took no action. Hundreds of trusted agents of the apparatus were despatched into the thick of the crowd. They tried to whistle us down, but their isolated whistles were quite drowned by the shouts of sympathy. The longer this continued, the more intolerable the situation became for the official leaders of the demonstration. In the end, the chairman of the Central Executive Committee and a few of its most prominent members came down from the first platform, around which there was nothing but a vast gulf of emptiness, and climbed onto ours, which stood at the very end and was in tended for the least important guests. But even this bold step failed to save the situation, for the people kept shouting names – and the names were not those of the official masters of the situation.
Zinoviev was instantly optimistic, and expected momentous consequences from this manifestation of sentiment. I did not share his impulsive estimate. The working masses of Leningrad demonstrated their dissatisfaction in the form of platonic sympathy for the leaders of the opposition, but they were still unable to prevent the apparatus from making short work of us. On this score I had no illusions. On the other hand, the demonstration was bound to suggest to the ruling faction the necessity of speeding up the destruction of the opposition, so that the masses might be confronted with an accomplished fact.
The next landmark was the Moscow demonstration in honor of the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. The organizers of the demonstration, the authors of the jubilee articles, and the speakers were, in most cases, people who either had been on the other side of the barricade during the events of October, or had simply sought shelter under the family roof until they could see what had happened, and had joined the revolution only after it had won a secure victory. It was with amusement rather than bitterness that I read articles and listened to radio speeches in which these hangers-on accused me of treason to the October Revolution. When you understand the dynamics of the historical process and see how your opponent is being pulled by strings controlled by a hand unknown to him, then the most disgusting acts of turpitude and perfidy lose their power over you.
The oppositionists decided to take part in the general procession, carrying their own placards, with their slogans. These were in no sense directed against the party; they read, for example:
“Let us turn our fire to the right – against the kulak, the nepman and the bureaucrat.” ...
“Let us carry out Lenin’s will.” ...
“Against opportunism, against a split, and for the unity of Lenin’s party.”
Today, these slogans form the official credo of the Stalin faction in its fight against the right wing. On November 7, the placards of the opposition were snatched from their hands and torn to pieces, while their bearers were mauled by specially organized units. The official leaders had learned their lesson in the Leningrad demonstration, and this time their preparations were much more efficient. The masses were showing signs of uneasiness. They joined in the demonstration with minds that were profoundly disquieted. And above the alarmed and bewildered people, two active groups were rising – the opposition and the apparatus. As volunteers in the fight against the “Trotskyists,” notoriously non-revolutionary and sometimes sheer Fascist elements in the streets of Moscow were now coming to the aid of the apparatus. A policeman, pretending to be giving a warning, shot openly at my automobile. Someone was guiding his hand. A drunken official of the fire-brigade, shouting imprecations, jumped on the running-board of my automobile and smashed the glass. To one who could see, the incidents in the Moscow streets on November 7, 1927, were obviously a rehearsal of the Thermidor."

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/mylife/ch42.htm

Note the bit in green where the regime fits up the Opposition.


"The emergence of a new ruling caste had deep social roots. The isolation of the revolution was the main reason behind the rise of Stalin and the bureaucracy, but at the same time this became the cause of new defeats of the international revolution: Bulgaria and Germany (1923); the defeat of the General Strike in Britain (1926); China (1927) and the most terrible defeat of all, that of Germany (1933). Each defeat of the international revolution, deepened the discouragement of the working class and further encouraged the bureaucrats and careerists. After the terrible defeat in China in 1927—the blame for which can be placed directly on the shoulders of Stalin and Bukharin—began the expulsion of the Opposition. Even before that, supporters of the Opposition were systematically persecuted, sacked from their jobs, ostracised and, in some cases, driven to suicide. The monstrous actions of the Stalinists were in complete contradiction to the democratic traditions of the Bolshevik Party. They consisted of the breaking-up of meetings by hooligans, a vicious campaign of lies and slander in the official press, the persecution of Trotsky’s friends and supporters which led to the deaths of numbers of prominent Bolsheviks such as Glazman (driven to suicide by blackmail) and Joffe, the famous Soviet diplomat who was denied access to necessary medical treatment and committed suicide. At Party meetings, Oppositionist speakers were subject to the systematic hooliganism of gangs of quasi-fascist thugs organised by the Stalinist apparatus to intimidate the opposition. The French Communist paper, Contre le Courant in the twenties reported the methods whereby the Stalinists conducted their “nation-wide Party discussion”:
“The bureaucrats of the Russian party have formed all over the country gangs of whistlers. Every time a party worker belonging to the Opposition is to take the floor, they post around the hall a veritable framework of men armed with police-whistles. With the first words of the Opposition speaker, the whistles begin. The charivari last until the Opposition speaker yields the floor to another.” (The Real Situation in Russia, p. 14, footnote.)
Given the isolation of the Revolution under conditions of terrible backwardness, the exhaustion of the working class and its vanguard, the victory of the Stalinist Bureaucracy was a foregone conclusion. This was not a result of Stalin’s cleverness or foresight. On the contrary. Stalin foresaw nothing and understood nothing, but proceeded empirically, as the constant zig-zags in his policy show. Stalin and his ally Bukharin steered a course to the right, attempting to base themselves on the “strong peasants” (i.e., the Kulaks). Trotsky and the Left Opposition insistently warned of the danger of such a policy. They advocated a policy of industrialisation, Five Year Plans and collectivisation by example. At a plenary session of the Central Committee in April 1927, Stalin poured scorn on this proposal. He actually compared the Opposition’s electrification plan (the Dnieperstroi scheme) to “offering a peasant a gramophone instead of a cow”.
The Opposition’s warnings were shown to be correct."
http://www.trotsky.net/trotsky_year/in_memory_of_trotsky.html







But during the 1920s the Stalinist leadership had often permitted the publication of statements and articles by various oppositionists within the party, at least until the moment of their defeat and expulsion.

Lol! At least until their expulsion! Trotsky and his family were forces to go to Kazakhstan, and then to leave the USSR completely in 1929. They had to go over the snow covered mountains to Turkey, part of the route was on foot.

Anyway, back to 1926-7, see the above. You have no clue what you are talking about.



Trotsky's works were published until the mid-1920s, and Bukharin continued to publish, howbeit within controlled parameters, until his arrest in 1937;

well Bakhurin was Stalin's right hand man, literally. Bakhurin was Stalin's ammunition against the left, up to 1928.

So Trotsky's works were published up to the mid 20s. How generous to let the man who predicted and led the Russian revolution, built and led to victory the Red Army, actually publish.

So fucking generous.



he was in fact editor of the government newspaper Izvestia until that time. [Stalin had personally nominated Bukharin to the Izvestia position in 1934]
Getty & Naumov. The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 103

You are quoting from a book called The Road To Terror, a book about the " dark inhumanity of the purge process". Have you no shame at all?




For an example,the anti-Stalin historian Roy Medvedev also notes such details:

Actually Trotsky wanted to try another test of strength with the Politburo. It seemed to him that the mood in the party had shifted in his favor. Dozens of oppositionists who came to see him at the offices of the Chief Concessions Committee assured him that this was so. Thus Trotsky decided on a renewal of factional political activity, which was conducted on a large scale and attracted more supporters than in the fall of 1926. The opposition groups in the various Soviet cities had their own local leaderships and their own faction discipline, and dues were collected from members. Opposition materials were published secretly on government printing presses, and a small illegal print shop was set up in Moscow for the same purpose. Trotsky knew about, and fully approved of, the use of such prerevolutionary conspiratorial methods. Assessing these events several years later, Trotsky wrote:
"In a very short time it was apparent that as a faction we had undoubtedly gained strength--that is to say, we had grown more united intellectually, and stronger in numbers...."
In this passage Trotsky obviously exaggerates the extent of Opposition influence among rank-and-file party members. He overstates even more the extent to which Stalin had been discredited by the Chinese events. Moreover, most of the illegal meetings and Opposition materials were no secret to Stalin and his immediate circle. He followed the activities of the opposition leaders very closely.
Medvedev, Roy. Let History Judge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 171

and your point is?



And we should also note that the Right-Opposition was active too,not just the Trotskyist Left-Opposition.
thanks for this revelation.

It's just a shame that you have no clue. The right opposition was Stalin's base!

wiki:

"Stalin and his "centre" faction had initially allied with Bukharin and the Right Opposition in order to defeat Trotsky and the Left."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_Opposition#Emergence

[daft punk]

No, there is no 'maybe' about it. The revolutionary wave had ebbed by 1923. Now, of course it is a lot easier to judge this is retrospect than it would have been at the time. Nevertheless, I think that it was quite clear at the time too, and many communists had remarked upon it. The fact remains though that by the time Trotsky began his opposition the working class had lost the initiative both in Russia and across Europe as a whole, and that during the revolutionary wave whilst there was still dynamism within both the Communist Parties, and the class as a whole Trotsky had stood against that.
Well there was a revolution in Germany going on for a kick off. Trotsky did not stand against the revolutionary wave, he led the revolution, and led the Red Army to defend it.

Rosa Luxemburg:

"The Bolsheviks have shown that they are capable of everything that a genuine revolutionary party can contribute within the limits of historical possibilities. They are not supposed to perform miracles. For a model and faultless proletarian revolution in an isolated land, exhausted by world war, strangled by imperialism, betrayed by the international proletariat, would be a miracle."




But do you really think he was raising it just as an abstract possibility of something that might happen in the future, and it had no connection with events that were taking place at the time? Remember this is in early 1918, a full five years before the beginnings of Trotsky's opposition.

I don't 'think' (make up assumptions is what you mean), I examine evidence. You give me evidence, i will examine it. so far you have conjecture around someone's idea of a possibility.




Originally Posted by Devrim http://www.revleft.com/vb/revleft/buttons/viewpost.gif (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?p=2378651#post2378651)
Lenin at the time called these views "a desertion to the camp of the petty bourgeoisie". In fact Osinky's ideas are well in line with those of Marx on the question "the emancipation of the proletariat is the task of the proletariat itself".

I would suggest that you read your Lenin then. The key text on these events is 'Left-wing Childishness and the Petite-bourgeois Mentality' (n.b. this is not a mistake. It is a separate pamphlet to the more well know one).

Sorry I've lost track. Post links and quotes if you wanna claim something.




People like this did try to make common cause with Trotsky in 1923. The original Left Opposition was not Trotskyist in the way we understand it today, but also included others more to the left of Trotsky. This despite the fact that previously Trotsky had been one of those most active against the oppositions within the party.

yeah, we know. During a civil war and famine.



As he replied to Lenin's letter:
[quote]
Well, if Lenin said it he must have had reason. I assume this bloke was calling for freedom of the press for everyone, so that would mean the bourgeois having freedom.





[QUOTE=Devrim;2379559]
Firstly on the question of the Civil War, the same Wikipedia article says:



The civil war was effectively over in November 1920.

That the Kronstadt mutiny was backed by the Whites is quite a controversial statement. As you put it earlier "I need supporting evidence for a claim like this".


"Here it is worth quoting from some of the statements issued by the crews of a number of ships, among them the mine-sweepers "Ural", "Orfei" and "Pobeditel": "The men of the White guards that are leading the rebels can do a lot of damage to the Republic, and they may not even hesitate to bomb Petrograd"."

"In the proclamations of the Kronstadt sailors we see the words that refer to "the men of the White guards that are leading the rebels ". These were not mere words. The real command over the rebels was concentrated not in the Kronstadt soviet, as some naive individuals may think, but in the so-called "Court for the Defence of Kronstadt Fortress". One of its leaders was rear-admiral S.H. Dmitriev (who was executed after the fortress fall), the other was general A. H. Koslovsky, who escaped to Finland. Both of these senior officers were very far from having any kind of sympathy for Socialism "with Bolsheviks" or "without Bolsheviks". There is also much talk about S. M. Petrechenko - the sailor and anti-Bolshevik leader. What is really interesting is to note that in 1927 this man was recruited by Stalin's GPU and he was one of Stalin's agent until 1944 when he was arrested by the Finnish authorities. The following year he died in a Finnish concentration camp."


Kronstadt: Trotsky was right! New material from Soviet archives confirms the Bolsheviks' position (http://www.marxist.com/kronstadt-trotsky-was-right.htm)

http://www.marxist.com/kronstadt-trotsky-was-right.htm







1921 is still two years before Trotsky's opposition began, but if you look at the Wiki page on the subject you will find it says:

sorry I dont have the energy to research this at the moment. If you have a solid case, spell it out in a simple clear way from start to finish. Yes they closed some anarchist operations, because they were a pain in the arse. The anarchists couldnt make up who's side they were on half the time.



So far you have not convinced me that Lenin and Trotsky were out of order, not even a bit, accidentally. I am willing to be convinced that they might have made mistakes. When you start saying they were anti-working class from the outset however, you render yourself immediately in the same camp as Stalinists, ie not worth listening to.

[Devrim]

Well there was a revolution in Germany going on for a kick off.

No, there wasn't. The revolution in Germany had been defeated. Even if you tried to stretch it out as long as you possibly could, the March Action in 1923 was the dying breath of the German revolution. Virtually everybody recognised in its aftermath though that the German revolution was long over and that the March Action had been a piece of adventurism that had ended in a massive defeat for the working class, and a severe weakening of the Communist Parties, and even if you take this line that the German revolution was still in process until March 1923, whereas most people would say 1918-19, it was still decisively over a good six months before the start of Trotsky's opposition.


Trotsky did not stand against the revolutionary wave, he led the revolution, and led the Red Army to defend it.

Trotsky played an important role in the actual revolution. After that though he was a firm supporter of actions taken against both the left of the party and the working class.


I don't 'think' (make up assumptions is what you mean), I examine evidence. You give me evidence, i will examine it. so far you have conjecture around someone's idea of a possibility.

This is really weak. Obviously he was writing about the process of events, not some hypothetical conjuncture. Just to spell out clearly what was really happening, let us go to Lozovsky, central committee member, supreme Soviet member, and deputy people's commissar:


The tasks of the trade unions and of the Soviet power is the isolation of the bourgeois elements who lead strikes and sabotage, but this isolation should not be achieved merely by mechanical means. by arrests, by shipping to the front or by deprivation of bread cards". "Preliminary censorship, the destruction of newspapers, the annihilation of freedom of agitation for the socialist and democratic parties is for us absolutely inadmissible. The closing of the news papers, violence against strikers, etc., irritated open wounds. There has been too much of this type of 'action' recently in the memory of the Russian toiling masses and this can lead to an analogy deadly to the Soviet power.

Here he is talking about violence against striking workers. When would you imagine this statement comes from? The answer is December 20th 1917.


Sorry I've lost track. Post links and quotes if you wanna claim something.

“Left-Wing” Childishness (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/may/09.htm)


yeah, we know. During a civil war and famine.

Yes, that is what happens when there are revolutions. It is funny that the Trotskyists can recognise this when dismissing anarchist apologism of "oh there was a civil war", and correctly criticise the anarchists for entering the bourgeois government in Spain, but use exactly the same defence when criticised themselves.

I am sorry. It just doesn't wash. All revolutions were, and will be made in difficult circumstances. It is part of their nature.


Well, if Lenin said it he must have had reason. I assume this bloke was calling for freedom of the press for everyone, so that would mean the bourgeois having freedom.

So obviously the guy was lying about what he had said himself. Do you not think that he might have had a reason too.

On the subject of Kronstadt, both the leadersip of the RCP(B) and their political descendants today did have reasons to tell lies. However, the offical party report into the matter stated:


uprising was entirely spontaneous in origin and drew into its maelstrom almost the entire population and the garrison of the fortress. . . the investigation failed to show the outbreak of the mutiny was preceded by the activity of any counter-revolutionary organisation at work among the fortress's command or that it was the work of the entente. The entire course of the movement speaks against that possibility. Had the mutiny been the work of some secret organisation which predated its outbreak, then that organisation would not have planned it for a time when the reserves of fuel and provisions were hardly sufficient for two weeks and when the thawing of the ice was still far off

Most of the more honest Trotskyists today admit that it was not a white guard led uprising and that the party told lies about it. They justify this on the grounds that there was the potential for the whites to take advantage.

Serge, who you have already quoted approvingly clearly states that the party told lies:


worse of it all was that we were paralysed by the official falsehoods. It had never happened before that our Party should lie to us like this. 'It's necessary for the benefit of the public,' said some

and Lenin stated at the Tenth Party Congress:


they did not want the White Guards, and they do not want our power either

That people like the CWI continue to lie about these events says more about them themselves than the events at Kronstadt.


sorry I dont have the energy to research this at the moment. If you have a solid case, spell it out in a simple clear way from start to finish. Yes they closed some anarchist operations, because they were a pain in the arse. The anarchists couldnt make up who's side they were on half the time.

So suppress other revolutionary organisations because they were 'a pain in the arse'.


So far you have not convinced me that Lenin and Trotsky were out of order, not even a bit,

That is OK.It is not you I am writing for. Nor was that my central point. My point was that Trotsky's opposition was to little, too late.

Devrim

[daft punk]

No, there wasn't. The revolution in Germany had been defeated. Even if you tried to stretch it out as long as you possibly could, the March Action in 1923 was the dying breath of the German revolution. Virtually everybody recognised in its aftermath though that the German revolution was long over and that the March Action had been a piece of adventurism that had ended in a massive defeat for the working class, and a severe weakening of the Communist Parties, and even if you take this line that the German revolution was still in process until March 1923, whereas most people would say 1918-19, it was still decisively over a good six months before the start of Trotsky's opposition.

No, there was a revolution planned for October, by the KPD and supported by the USSR, but it was not planned very well and was later cancelled at the last minute. You have to understand the situation. Inflation was so bad that in August prices doubled every few hours! This should automatically bring down governmets and regimes, no-one can live like that. 3 million were on strike and the government resigned. Hundreds of thousands left the SPD for the KPD. If that is not a potential revolution I dont know what is.



Trotsky played an important role in the actual revolution. After that though he was a firm supporter of actions taken against both the left of the party and the working class.

Which you have said but not demonstrated. What have you produced so far, one anarchist newspaper closed down, allegedly? Lenin refusing to allow freedom of the press for all?




This is really weak. Obviously he was writing about the process of events, not some hypothetical conjuncture.

He said IF. There is a film called IF. It is a crazy fantasy.




Just to spell out clearly what was really happening, let us go to Lozovsky, central committee member, supreme Soviet member, and deputy people's commissar:
Originally Posted by Lozovsky
"The tasks of the trade unions and of the Soviet power is the isolation of the bourgeois elements who lead strikes and sabotage, but this isolation should not be achieved merely by mechanical means. by arrests, by shipping to the front or by deprivation of bread cards".

"Preliminary censorship, the destruction of newspapers, the annihilation of freedom of agitation for the socialist and democratic parties is for us absolutely inadmissible. The closing of the news papers, violence against strikers, etc., irritated open wounds. There has been too much of this type of 'action' recently in the memory of the Russian toiling masses and this can lead to an analogy deadly to the Soviet power. "

Here he is talking about violence against striking workers. When would you imagine this statement comes from? The answer is December 20th 1917.

He says "The tasks of the trade unions and of the Soviet power is the isolation of the bourgeois elements who lead strikes and sabotage".

You did read that correctly? And where does he advocate violence? Unfortunately this is not on the net so I cannot verify it. You have a full stop in the middle of the first sentence. He mentions violence, and says it is a BAD THING. So there had been some. You think Lenin and Trotsky could comntrol the actions ove every individual in Russia or something?

You 'support' is a CC member calling for freedom of the press and NO VIOLENCE. You just shot yourself in the foot with that one. Yeah we know there were bits and bobs of violence. Because the workers were doing it in the name of revolution. Just the kinds thing you advocate, it wasnt authorised from above, it was the opposite.


Try again.










“Left-Wing” Childishness (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/may/09.htm)


please quote the relevant bit.



Originally Posted by Devrim http://www.revleft.com/vb/revleft/buttons/viewpost.gif (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?p=2379559#post2379559)
"People like this did try to make common cause with Trotsky in 1923. The original Left Opposition was not Trotskyist in the way we understand it today, but also included others more to the left of Trotsky. This despite the fact that previously Trotsky had been one of those most active against the oppositions within the party. "

Originally Posted by daft punk http://www.revleft.com/vb/revleft/buttons/viewpost.gif (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?p=2379601#post2379601)
"yeah, we know. During a civil war and famine. "

Yes, that is what happens when there are revolutions. It is funny that the Trotskyists can recognise this when dismissing anarchist apologism of "oh there was a civil war", and correctly criticise the anarchists for entering the bourgeois government in Spain, but use exactly the same defence when criticised themselves.

I am sorry. It just doesn't wash. All revolutions were, and will be made in difficult circumstances. It is part of their nature.

Please explain what you are trying to say here, I cant fathom it. What has the anarchists joining a bourgeois government got to do with Trotsky's role in the Russian civil war, where his enemy was the bourgeois?

This makes no sense.



Originally Posted by daft punk http://www.revleft.com/vb/revleft/buttons/viewpost.gif (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?p=2379601#post2379601)
"Well, if Lenin said it he must have had reason. I assume this bloke was calling for freedom of the press for everyone, so that would mean the bourgeois having freedom. "
So obviously the guy was lying about what he had said himself. Do you not think that he might have had a reason too.


I cant keep track of this. Give me all the links and quotes together if you wanna make a case for this. The impression I get is that he wanted freedom of the press and Lenin said that would aid the bourgeois.






On the subject of Kronstadt, both the leadersip of the RCP(B) and their political descendants today did have reasons to tell lies.

what reason?


However, the offical party report into the matter stated:
"uprising was entirely spontaneous in origin and drew into its maelstrom almost the entire population and the garrison of the fortress. . . the investigation failed to show the outbreak of the mutiny was preceded by the activity of any counter-revolutionary organisation at work among the fortress's command or that it was the work of the entente. The entire course of the movement speaks against that possibility. Had the mutiny been the work of some secret organisation which predated its outbreak, then that organisation would not have planned it for a time when the reserves of fuel and provisions were hardly sufficient for two weeks and when the thawing of the ice was still far off "


what official report? Where is the link? And did I say it was planned? Who said it was planned? What we are saying is that it was exploited, stirred up by counter-revolutionaries, and regardless, it was a mutiny that endangered the revolution. The thawing of the ice was not far off that is the point, that is why the Reds had to move.

Tell me, did you bother to read my link?






Most of the more honest Trotskyists today admit that it was not a white guard led uprising and that the party told lies about it. They justify this on the grounds that there was the potential for the whites to take advantage.

show that Trotsky said it was planned.

Trotsky:
"Whatever the immediate or remote causes of the Kronstadt rebellion, it was in its very essence a mortal danger to the dictatorship of the proletariat. "
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/01/kronstadt.htm




Serge, who you have already quoted approvingly clearly states that the party told lies:
"Originally Posted by V.Serge
worse of it all was that we were paralysed by the official falsehoods. It had never happened before that our Party should lie to us like this. 'It's necessary for the benefit of the public,' said some "


Yes, he initially supported the Bolsheviks actions, then later changed his mind. Note this was later in the 1930s. regardless of his final position on the matter, Serge and Trotsky's wife wrote Trotsky biography together, so he cant have disapproved too much.

I suggest you read the above link to gain some understanding on Kronstadt.

"Or perhaps it would have been sufficient to inform the Kronstadt sailors of the NEP decrees to pacify them? Illusion! The insurgents did not have a conscious program and they could not have had one because of the very nature of the petty bourgeoisie. They themselves did not clearly understand that what their fathers and brothers needed first of all was free trade. They were discontented and confused but they saw no way out. The more conscious, i.e., the rightist elements, acting behind the scenes, wanted the restoration of the bourgeois regime. But they did not say so out loud. The “left” wing wanted the liquidation of discipline, “free soviets,” and better rations. The regime of the NEP could only gradually pacify the peasant, and, after him, the discontented sections of the army and the fleet. But for this time and experience were needed."
Trotsky, link above.




and Lenin stated at the Tenth Party Congress:
Originally Posted by Lenin
they did not want the White Guards, and they do not want our power either

See above. This is getting tedious. Please supply links and/or quote from the net so I can find stuff.

You are under the illusion that it was a black and white thing, and a preconceived plot, concocted by a White mastermind and foisted on the people. This is the mentality behind all you beliefs, eg that the whole revolution was just a plot by a few Bolsheviks.

Tell me, do you consider yourself a Marxist? Because you dont look or smell like one.




That people like the CWI continue to lie about these events says more about them themselves than the events at Kronstadt.


support, or fucking retract. This is getting like debating with a Stalinist now, worse than swimming through sewage.





So suppress other revolutionary organisations because they were 'a pain in the arse'.

You have no idea have you? Do you know what pain in the arse means? It means attacking Bolsheviks and killing them, attacking trains, raiding cities, seizing and hoarding grain, forming private armies, with conscription, seizing important fortresses that guarded the capital city.




That is OK.It is not you I am writing for. Nor was that my central point. My point was that Trotsky's opposition was to little, too late.

Devrim

No fucker else is reading this stuff. If you are just on a point scoring exercise, writing each post for a stray reader who has not read the thread, then give up now. It is a waste of time. I am prepared to listen to honest, carefully constructed arguments, with proper quotes and links, from left coms, but I wont waste my time.

[Omsk]

Because you are trying to sound objective when in fact you support the murder of all the left opposition, the lies, the frameups, the political counter-revolution. And what you say is vague, wrong, and meaningless. The fact is that at the time Trotsky was failing to get popular support there were reasons beyond his control as I have clearly explained.



Beyond his control?Laughable.He had potential,i must say,as a counter-force to the state,but he was essentially a failure.



Simply not popular, for no reason whatsoever! Such a profound Marxist, materialist analysis! NOT!! Do you even know what Marxism basically is?



Calm down,no need for such silly acusations when you have no arguments.


Consciousness is determined by material conditions. The conditions were exhaustion after 10 years of war and civil war, poverty, famine, and then to top it all the defeat of the Chinese revolution (thanks to Stalin). Plus it was a backward country, and isolated.


Defeat of the Chinese revolution because of ONE man?Stalin?

NICE MARXISM you laughable clown.




I can provide plenty of proof. This was the start of a one-man dictatorship which ended in 10,000 Trotskists shot in the Gulag.

"The nearer drew the time for the fifteenth congress, set for the end of 1927, the more the party felt that it had reached a crossroads in history. Alarm was rife in the ranks. In spite of a monstrous terror, the desire to hear the opposition awoke in the party. This could be achieved only by illegal means. Secret meetings were held in various parts of Moscow and Leningrad, attended by workers and students of both sexes, who gathered in groups of from twenty to one hundred and two hundred to hear some representative of the opposition. In one day I would visit two, three, and sometimes four of such meetings. They were usually held in some worker’s apartment. Two small rooms would be packed with people, and the speaker would stand at the door between the two rooms. Sometimes every one would sit on the floor; more often the discussion had to be carried on stand big, for lack of space. Occasionally representatives of the Control Commission would appear at such meetings and demand that everyone leave. They were invited to take part in the discussion. If they caused any disturbance they were put out. In all, about 20,000 people attended such meetings in Moscow and Leningrad. The number was growing. The opposition cleverly prepared a huge meeting in the hall of the High Technical School, which had been occupied from within. The hall was crammed with two thousand people, while a huge crowd remained outside in the street. The attempts of the administration to stop the meeting proved ineffectual. Kamenev and I spoke for about two hours. Finally the Central Committee issued an appeal to the workers to break up the meetings of the opposition by force. This appeal was merely a screen for carefully prepared attacks on the opposition by military units under the guidance of the GPU. Stalin wanted a bloody settlement of the conflict. We gave the signal for a temporary discontinuance of the large meetings. But this was not until after the demonstration of November 7. In October of 1927, the Central Executive Committee held its session in Leningrad. In honor of the occasion, the authorities staged a mass demonstration. But through an unforeseen circumstance, the demonstration took an entirely unexpected turn. Zinoviev and I and a few others of the opposition were making the rounds of the city by automobile, to see the size and temper of the demonstration. Toward the end of our drive, we approached the Taurid Palace where motor-trucks were drawn up as platforms for the members of the Central Executive Committee. Our automobile stopped short before a line of police; there was no farther passage. Before we could make up our minds how to get out of the impasse, the commander hurried to our car and quite guilelessly offered to escort us to the platform. Before we could overcome our hesitation, two lines of police opened a way for us to the last motor-truck, which was still unoccupied. When the masses learned that we were on the last platform, the character of the demonstration changed instantly. The people began to pass by the first trucks indifferently, with out even answering the greetings from them, and hurried on to our platform. Soon a bank of thousands of people had been formed around our truck. Workers and soldiers halted, looked up, shouted their greetings, and then were obliged to move on because of the impatient pressure of those behind them. A platoon of police which was sent to our truck to restore order was itself caught up by the general mood, and took no action. Hundreds of trusted agents of the apparatus were despatched into the thick of the crowd. They tried to whistle us down, but their isolated whistles were quite drowned by the shouts of sympathy. The longer this continued, the more intolerable the situation became for the official leaders of the demonstration. In the end, the chairman of the Central Executive Committee and a few of its most prominent members came down from the first platform, around which there was nothing but a vast gulf of emptiness, and climbed onto ours, which stood at the very end and was in tended for the least important guests. But even this bold step failed to save the situation, for the people kept shouting names – and the names were not those of the official masters of the situation.
Zinoviev was instantly optimistic, and expected momentous consequences from this manifestation of sentiment. I did not share his impulsive estimate. The working masses of Leningrad demonstrated their dissatisfaction in the form of platonic sympathy for the leaders of the opposition, but they were still unable to prevent the apparatus from making short work of us. On this score I had no illusions. On the other hand, the demonstration was bound to suggest to the ruling faction the necessity of speeding up the destruction of the opposition, so that the masses might be confronted with an accomplished fact.
The next landmark was the Moscow demonstration in honor of the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. The organizers of the demonstration, the authors of the jubilee articles, and the speakers were, in most cases, people who either had been on the other side of the barricade during the events of October, or had simply sought shelter under the family roof until they could see what had happened, and had joined the revolution only after it had won a secure victory. It was with amusement rather than bitterness that I read articles and listened to radio speeches in which these hangers-on accused me of treason to the October Revolution. When you understand the dynamics of the historical process and see how your opponent is being pulled by strings controlled by a hand unknown to him, then the most disgusting acts of turpitude and perfidy lose their power over you.
The oppositionists decided to take part in the general procession, carrying their own placards, with their slogans. These were in no sense directed against the party; they read, for example:
“Let us turn our fire to the right – against the kulak, the nepman and the bureaucrat.” ...
“Let us carry out Lenin’s will.” ...
“Against opportunism, against a split, and for the unity of Lenin’s party.”
Today, these slogans form the official credo of the Stalin faction in its fight against the right wing. On November 7, the placards of the opposition were snatched from their hands and torn to pieces, while their bearers were mauled by specially organized units. The official leaders had learned their lesson in the Leningrad demonstration, and this time their preparations were much more efficient. The masses were showing signs of uneasiness. They joined in the demonstration with minds that were profoundly disquieted. And above the alarmed and bewildered people, two active groups were rising – the opposition and the apparatus. As volunteers in the fight against the “Trotskyists,” notoriously non-revolutionary and sometimes sheer Fascist elements in the streets of Moscow were now coming to the aid of the apparatus. A policeman, pretending to be giving a warning, shot openly at my automobile. Someone was guiding his hand. A drunken official of the fire-brigade, shouting imprecations, jumped on the running-board of my automobile and smashed the glass. To one who could see, the incidents in the Moscow streets on November 7, 1927, were obviously a rehearsal of the Thermidor."

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trot...ylife/ch42.htm (http://www.anonym.to/?http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/mylife/ch42.htm)

Note the bit in green where the regime fits up the Opposition.


"The emergence of a new ruling caste had deep social roots. The isolation of the revolution was the main reason behind the rise of Stalin and the bureaucracy, but at the same time this became the cause of new defeats of the international revolution: Bulgaria and Germany (1923); the defeat of the General Strike in Britain (1926); China (1927) and the most terrible defeat of all, that of Germany (1933). Each defeat of the international revolution, deepened the discouragement of the working class and further encouraged the bureaucrats and careerists. After the terrible defeat in China in 1927—the blame for which can be placed directly on the shoulders of Stalin and Bukharin—began the expulsion of the Opposition. Even before that, supporters of the Opposition were systematically persecuted, sacked from their jobs, ostracised and, in some cases, driven to suicide. The monstrous actions of the Stalinists were in complete contradiction to the democratic traditions of the Bolshevik Party. They consisted of the breaking-up of meetings by hooligans, a vicious campaign of lies and slander in the official press, the persecution of Trotsky’s friends and supporters which led to the deaths of numbers of prominent Bolsheviks such as Glazman (driven to suicide by blackmail) and Joffe, the famous Soviet diplomat who was denied access to necessary medical treatment and committed suicide. At Party meetings, Oppositionist speakers were subject to the systematic hooliganism of gangs of quasi-fascist thugs organised by the Stalinist apparatus to intimidate the opposition. The French Communist paper, Contre le Courant in the twenties reported the methods whereby the Stalinists conducted their “nation-wide Party discussion”:
“The bureaucrats of the Russian party have formed all over the country gangs of whistlers. Every time a party worker belonging to the Opposition is to take the floor, they post around the hall a veritable framework of men armed with police-whistles. With the first words of the Opposition speaker, the whistles begin. The charivari last until the Opposition speaker yields the floor to another.” (The Real Situation in Russia, p. 14, footnote.)
Given the isolation of the Revolution under conditions of terrible backwardness, the exhaustion of the working class and its vanguard, the victory of the Stalinist Bureaucracy was a foregone conclusion. This was not a result of Stalin’s cleverness or foresight. On the contrary. Stalin foresaw nothing and understood nothing, but proceeded empirically, as the constant zig-zags in his policy show. Stalin and his ally Bukharin steered a course to the right, attempting to base themselves on the “strong peasants” (i.e., the Kulaks). Trotsky and the Left Opposition insistently warned of the danger of such a policy. They advocated a policy of industrialisation, Five Year Plans and collectivisation by example. At a plenary session of the Central Committee in April 1927, Stalin poured scorn on this proposal. He actually compared the Opposition’s electrification plan (the Dnieperstroi scheme) to “offering a peasant a gramophone instead of a cow”.
The Opposition’s warnings were shown to be correct."
http://www.trotsky.net/trotsky_year/...f_trotsky.html (http://www.anonym.to/?http://www.trotsky.net/trotsky_year/in_memory_of_trotsky.html)



Sory i don't accept Trotsky's words,i prefer real historians.If you don't know any of them,all right.That does not,however,give you the right to post such silly nonsense.


You have no clue what you are talking about.


Hahaha.
This is coming from someone who uses Trotsky's own words in a discussion such as this.



well Bakhurin was Stalin's right hand man, literally. Bakhurin was Stalin's ammunition against the left, up to 1928.



Up to 1928.Stalin and Bukharin had many different positions.


So fucking generous.

Yes,quite surprising,leting the enemy of the state and the party have his books published.

Very generous.


You are quoting from a book called The Road To Terror, a book about the " dark inhumanity of the purge process". Have you no shame at all?



The name of the book is completely unimportant.I fail to see how this has any value to the discussion.On the other hand,Getty is a widely accepted historian on the USSR.



and your point is?


The Left Opposition certainly had an active role in Soviet politics,and they had their chance.



thanks for this revelation.


No problem,if you need some more information,i would be gald to answer.


The right opposition was Stalin's base!

Despite wikipedia ("SERIOUS SOUCE") says so,this is false.Stalin was essentially on the "center" - the party stance,while Trotsky and Bukharin were factionalists and dangerous elements.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

Sory i don't accept Trotsky's words,i prefer real historians.If you don't know any of them,all right.That does not,however,give you the right to post such silly nonsense.

Sory indeed, comrade Omsk. You don't prefer "real" historians. You prefer Stalinist hacks. In fact, you have admirable knowledge of tremendously obscure texts by the most dubious "historians." Daft is citing creditable sources. Also, the official Stalinist narrative, as I have said many times, sounds delusional -- it makes no fucking sense.

[Omsk]

Sory indeed, comrade Omsk. You don't prefer "real" historians. You prefer Stalinist hacks. In fact, you have admirable knowledge of tremendously obscure texts by the most dubious "historians." Daft is citing creditable sources. Also, the official Stalinist narrative, as I have said many times, sounds delusional -- it makes no fucking sense.



In the first post here,i quotes from the works of Getty & Naumov and Medvedev ,sorry,but they are not 'Stalinist hacks' .

And no,Daft Punk is citing from Trotsky,and wikipedia.

Not ceditable sources,not by a chance.

Quoting Trotsky in this discussion is the equivalent of me quoting Stalin as a source on the events.Anyone even completely distanced from history,knows that there simply isn't place for such 'quotings' and use of 'sources'. (Wikipedia/Trotsky's word on the LO/etc etc)

[daft punk]

Beyond his control?Laughable.He had potential,i must say,as a counter-force to the state,but he was essentially a failure.

Yes, the fact that Stalin fucked up the Chinese revolution was beyond Trotsky's control. The fact that Russia was a backward country and the revolution happened in WW1 was beyond his control. The fact that it was isolated was beyond his control. These are the objective conditions. As a so-called Marxist you should have some vague conception as to what that means.





Calm down,no need for such silly acusations when you have no arguments.

I am serious. You concentrate on the subjective factor and ignore the objective. This is not the Marxist way.






Defeat of the Chinese revolution because of ONE man?Stalin?

NICE MARXISM you laughable clown.


Stalin had a lot of sway of Mao and the USSR had huge sway over the Chinese people. Stalin basically merged the CCP and the KMT, which was a disaster, a disastrous class-collaboration. Stalin even banned the formation of soviets. At times of revolution, correct leadership is vital. Trotsky of course said the opposite, that the CCP should stay independent and advocated forming soviets. But Stalin was the 'official' line and Trotsky's voice was not heard. Russia was becoming a one man dictatorship. And Stalin was running a huge campaign of lies and violence against the Left Opposition, gearing up for a total ban, and later genocide.








Sory i don't accept Trotsky's words,i prefer real historians.If you don't know any of them,all right.That does not,however,give you the right to post such silly nonsense.

You are a sad waste of time Omsk, so maybe it's not worth me bothering with your posts. If you cant even be bothered to read on comment on the above, and just call it nonsense, with no reasons, this discussion is pointless, as you have no interest in the truth.

Goodbye.

[daft punk]

Sory indeed, comrade Omsk. You don't prefer "real" historians. You prefer Stalinist hacks. In fact, you have admirable knowledge of tremendously obscure texts by the most dubious "historians." Daft is citing creditable sources. Also, the official Stalinist narrative, as I have said many times, sounds delusional -- it makes no fucking sense.

"Why listen to the Jews who survived the holocaust? They are biased against Hitler. They are liars. To quote their testimony is useless."

disclaimer - the above is a parody of Omsk's statement not to be taken literally.

Here is a bloke who risked his life for the USSR for years, working as a spy against the Nazis:

"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.” Trepper had arrived in the USSR in his own words “carrying the dreams of a neophyte. I was a young and an ardent communist…” but as he witnessed the rise of Stalin’s cult of the personality, the fake trials of “conspirators,” how “many militants publicly supported Stalin’s positions although they did not approve of them. This terrible hypocrisy accelerated the inner demoralisation of the party,” Trepper began to question the old certainties.
Lenin’s Testament, which had called for Stalin’s removal was being circulated amongst the students, but the completion of Stalin’s coup at the 17th Party Congress with the election of Kirov and Stalin, meant the pace of the incipient bureaucratism rapidly accelerated. The assassination of Kirov in 1934, probably the work of Stalin, was “Stalin’s Reichstag fire”, was the excuse for a general purge. The Old Bolsheviks were slaughtered on mass, Burkharin’s prophecy was fulfilled, forced to make tortured confessions, in mass show trials, before being dispatched with a bullet to the back of the head. No one felt safe.
No one was immune from the reach of the NKVD, Stalin’s secret police. Trepper describes how; “at night in our university…headlights would pierce the darkness… “They’re here! They’re here! When we heard that cry a wave of anxiety would run through the dormitories…stomachs knotted in insane terror, we would watch for the cars of the KNVD to stop… “They’re coming.” The noise got louder…shouts doors slamming. They went by without stopping. But what about tomorrow?”
Trepper was not alone in enduring the terror; “yet we went along sick at heart, but passive, caught up in machinery we had set in motion…all those who did not rise up against the Stalinist machine are responsible, collectively responsible. I am no exception to this verdict.”
Like most he was too lost to counter Stalin's assault on the party. A member from only the late 1920s onwards, he had neither the training, or experience to understand the political root of the degeneration of the revolution; “But who did protest…The Trotskyites can lay claim to that honour…let them not forget, however, that they had the enormous advantage over us of having a coherent political system capable of replacing Stalinism….they did not “confess,” for they knew that their confession would serve neither the party nor socialism.”"


http://www.permanentrevolution.net/entry/1009

[A Marxist Historian]

This is completely incorrect. Myasnikov was not responsible for killing the Romanov children. He was responsible for killing the Tzar's brother Grand Duke Michael nor did he do a 'flip-flop' as you put it, but was still active in communist politics until his death by execution in 1945.

Would the fact that he had later capitulated make what he said in 1918 wrong? I think (but am not 100% certain) that they are different V.Osinky's anyway though.

Devrim

Point taken, I got my Romanovs crossed. But going from killing Romanovs to demanding free speech for Romanovs sounds like a flip flop to me!

On Osinsky, it's the same Osinsky. A while back I had occasion to read the discussions at the infamous February 1937 CC plenum, where the Great Terror started. Osinsky's remarks there are interesting.

He's still a dissident there in his own way, not in any way challenging the roundup of ex-Zinovievists, ex-Trotskyists, Bukharin himself, etc. as all saboteurs putting ground glass in the workers' food at Hitler's behest, but rather firing back pretty effectively at those trying to drag him into murderous whirlpool, denouncing them as obscurantist bureaucrats in a way that could be read as a covert attack on Stalin.

And, obviously, was read that way by Stalin, who had him shot, and all his critics a few weeks later. Stalin didn't like bureaucrats.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

No, there wasn't. The revolution in Germany had been defeated. Even if you tried to stretch it out as long as you possibly could, the March Action in 1923 was the dying breath of the German revolution. Virtually everybody recognised in its aftermath though that the German revolution was long over and that the March Action had been a piece of adventurism that had ended in a massive defeat for the working class, and a severe weakening of the Communist Parties, and even if you take this line that the German revolution was still in process until March 1923, whereas most people would say 1918-19, it was still decisively over a good six months before the start of Trotsky's opposition...

The "March Action" was in 1921 not 1923. The KPD was then more or less under the influence of the "left coms," so numerous here on Revleft and so absent elsewhere. It was an ultraleft blunder that definitely weakened German Communism, which before the "March Action" arguably had more support in the German working class than did the SPD. It was especially disastrous for the KPD position in the unions.

But any serious German historian can tell you that 1923, the year of the French occupation of the Ruhr and inflation going to the point that people were burning Deutschmarks for fuel as they were cheaper than firewood, was a far more serious crisis point in German history than 1921.

At the peak of the crisis in the summer of 1923, the German CP unquestionably was the party German workers were looking to for answers, and the German government was on its last legs, and the German army, due to Versailles restrictions, was pretty damn small and quite defeatable, as well as likely splittable. It was a revolutionary situation if ever there was one, much more so than the spring of 1921.

Unfortunately, the leadership of the German CP, Brandler et. al., basically had the same attitude you do, and so most of the historians, including allegedly leftist historians like the Revolutionary History magazine in England, take their cues from the Brandlerite notion that the German workers just weren't quite up for a revolution. Far from true!

Best treatment of this is the Spartacist piece, which I've posted the link to before:

http://www.icl-fi.org/english/esp/56/germany1923.html

-M.H.-

[Omsk]

Ah,i see you 'ran away',good,i was hoping that you would stop your pathetic 'arguments' - because you have none,and your laughable kind is so childish and at the same time very hostile because of your lack of knowledge.And i think it is fair that i should ignore you in historical dicussions,i mean,seriously,citing from Trotsky as a historical source?Just plain crazy/childish.



You concentrate on the subjective factor and ignore the objective.


Says the one who's idea of the cause of every problem of the world communist movement is - Stalin.

But,as you have said,goodbye.

[Red Storm]

There's an error in every paragraph, nearly every sentence, of the posting below, and I am not momentarily in the mood to write a giant posting chopping it to pieces.

So I'll just stick to where you go furthest out onto a limb and then saw it off your very own self.

Just what is this overwhelming evidence for your fantasy that the Americans were supporting Lenin and Trotsky? That the Americans gave Trotsky a passport? Why on earth wouldn't they, he had every right to one, as a citizen of a country allied with the USA. Especially since Woodrow Wilson's famous "Fourteen Points" to end WWI were directly cribbed from a pamphlet by Trotsky. This means no more than the fact that the Germans let Lenin buy a train ticket through Russia (and Menshevik leader Martov too).

What it meant is that the capitalists usually don't break their own rules and violate democratic principles when they have no need to.

So lets see your indisputable evidence for this crazy fantasy. My guess is the mutterings of some paranoid 9-11 conspiracy freak or other.

-M.H.-
I think you misunderstood my point. You are making the same point indirectly. I was just using the 'passport' to show how anyone can make a fact into an analysis and connect dots to make a fact have a different meaning. The passport was issued; that is a fact. The passport was a US passport. Fact. Yet what does this say as far as an analysis goes? To me it, personally, it means these people were willing to make deals in order to achieve the revolution but it doesn't mean they were not good people or good Marxists. That post was about facts vs. feelings and not attempting to place any spin on the facts. If it seemed that way, I apologize, for not making myself clearer.

This is my second attempt to write this post. I lost the first one and I keep getting interrupted. I hope this clears this misunderstanding up but I may not be able to continue my posting much throughout the night. :thumbdown:

[Red Storm]

please read all the links and stick to the OP as this is getting too broad. The purges, Spain, China, they are really beyond this thread, apart from the revolution in China 1925-7. I dont wanna spread you too thin. We can do other threads. And I am here to give the Trotskyist version, as best I can, not find a fence to sit on.
That is fine because I don't think some are reading the whole thread and some are not getting my point either. Either way we are getting farther and farther away from the OP. Maybe I will start a thread on what I meant at some other time. My point is there is no such thing as black and white issues when it comes to politics and it seems far too many people here look at people as hero or villain and it thwarts intellectual process when it is based on feelings and circumstantial evidence at best. Not that all that has been mentioned has been that way.

I can give you plenty of references to support my 'facts' and most of it is very easy to find and prove. I will leave a piece from wiki on Ho Chi Minh and the US support he wisely used to support a party to liberate his people. For his practical common sense alone he is one of my favorite revolutionary figures along with Giap. He was not a 'traitor' or 'spy' or any of the other things his enemies claimed at the time(if you doubt me read the writings by them or a history book on it) but a devoted Marxist-Leninist(or insert what ever the orthodox label should be) who made the right choices to get the job done. That illustrates my point best of all I think. Truth is stranger than fiction and politics often require "strange" alliances unless you know why they are just obviously the right thing to do rather than strange.

In 1941, Hồ returned to Vietnam to lead the Việt Minh (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viet_Minh) independence movement. The “men in black” were a 10,000 member guerrilla force that operated with the Việt Minh.[17] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ho_Chi_Minh#cite_note-16) He oversaw many successful military actions against the Vichy French (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vichy_French) and Japanese occupation of Vietnam during World War II, supported closely but clandestinely by the United States Office of Strategic Services (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Strategic_Services), and later against the French bid to reoccupy the country (1946–54). He was jailed in China by Chiang Kai-shek (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiang_Kai-shek)'s local authorities before being rescued by Chinese Communists.[18] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ho_Chi_Minh#cite_note-17) Following his release in 1943, he returned to Vietnam. He was treated for malaria and dysentery by American (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States) OSS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Strategic_Services) doctors. In the highlands in 1944, he lived with Do Thi Lac, a woman of Tày (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_people) ethnicity.[19] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ho_Chi_Minh#cite_note-Lac-18) She gave birth to a son in 1956.[19] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ho_Chi_Minh#cite_note-Lac-18)

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


My next post will be on the OP directly. My apologies to Daft Punk for getting us too off topic.

[Devrim]

The "March Action" was in 1921 not 1923. The KPD was then more or less under the influence of the "left coms," so numerous here on Revleft and so absent elsewhere. It was an ultraleft blunder that definitely weakened German Communism, which before the "March Action" arguably had more support in the German working class than did the SPD. It was especially disastrous for the KPD position in the unions.

That is a bit of an embarrassing mistake.:blushing: Actually though it would reinforce my point. The KPD certainly wasn't under the influence of Left communists at the time as they had all been expelled the previous year. By the way the KAPD was against the March action, which it thought was 'adventurist', but joined in when it occured as they felt they couldn't stand aside.

Devrim

[Devrim]

No, there was a revolution planned for October, by the KPD and supported by the USSR, but it was not planned very well and was later cancelled at the last minute. You have to understand the situation. Inflation was so bad that in August prices doubled every few hours! This should automatically bring down governmets and regimes, no-one can live like that. 3 million were on strike and the government resigned. Hundreds of thousands left the SPD for the KPD. If that is not a potential revolution I dont know what is.

I have lived in situation when prices doubled in a matter of hours. I certainly didn't notice any sort of revolutionary situation at the time. If what you were saying were true, there would have been numerous revolutions across the world. Zimbabwe would be a prime example.

There was no serious plan for revolution in 1923, but even the plan you refer to was, as you say, canceled because even the worst adventurists in the Comintern could see that the situation had passed.


Yes, he initially supported the Bolsheviks actions, then later changed his mind. Note this was later in the 1930s. regardless of his final position on the matter, Serge and Trotsky's wife wrote Trotsky biography together, so he cant have disapproved too much.

Serge later had doubts about Kronstadt. I don't think he changed his mind. What you seem to be suggesting is that he deliberately later lied about what had happened to support his point. Either the party lied about it or they didn't. If they didn't it means that Serge, and numerous others did.

Many people who were not that close to Trotsky politically had contact with him in exile. For example Otto Rhüle, who was against the suppression of Kronstadt, and condemned the Bolshevik's role during the Russian revolution from a very early date, served on the Dewey Commission.



Or perhaps it would have been sufficient to inform the Kronstadt sailors of the NEP decrees to pacify them? Illusion! The insurgents did not have a conscious program and they could not have had one because of the very nature of the petty bourgeoisie.

I think the demands of the Kronstadt Soviet are quite well known. It is worth repeating them here though in case anyone is unaware of them:


1. immediate new elections to the Soviets. The present Soviets no longer express the wishes of the workers and peasants. The new elections should be by secret ballot, and should be preceded by free electoral propaganda.
2. Freedom of speech and of the press for workers and peasants, for the Anarchists, and for the Left Socialist parties.
3. The right of assembly, and freedom for trade union and peasant organisations.
4. The organisation, at the latest on 10th March 1921, of a Conference of non-Party workers, solders and sailors of Petrograd, Kronstadt and the Petrograd District.
5. The liberation of all political prisoners of the Socialist parties, and of all imprisoned workers and peasants, soldiers and sailors belonging to working class and peasant organisations.
6. The election of a commission to look into the dossiers of all those detained in prisons and concentration camps.
7. The abolition of all political sections in the armed forces. No political party should have privileges for the propagation of its ideas, or receive State subsidies to this end. In the place of the political sections various cultural groups should be set up, deriving resources from the State.
8. The immediate abolition of the militia detachments set up between towns and countryside.
9. The equalisation of rations for all workers, except those engaged in dangerous or unhealthy jobs.
10. The abolition of Party combat detachments in all military groups. The abolition of Party guards in factories and enterprises. If guards are required, they should be nominated, taking into account the views of the workers.
11. The granting to the peasants of freedom of action on their own soil, and of the right to own cattle, provided they look after them themselves and do not employ hired labour.
12. We request that all military units and officer trainee groups associate themselves with this resolution. 13. We demand that the Press give proper publicity to this resolution.
14. We demand the institution of mobile workers' control groups.
15. We demand that handicraft production be authorised provided it does not utilise wage labour.

I would say that this amounts to a 'conscious programme'. It is true that there are concessions to the peasantry in there. At the time everyone recognised that they were neccesary. However, they go nowhere near as far as the NEP did.


I suggest you read the above link to gain some understanding on Kronstadt.

I did, and to be honest I was surprised by how little there was that was new in it. It was just the same tired reheated argument.


please quote the relevant bit.

I think it is quite strange that you expect people to read your links, but can't be bothered to read a very short pamphlet by Lenin that explains his opinions in full. You can of course look up the relevant phrase if you want.


See above. This is getting tedious. Please supply links and/or quote from the net so I can find stuff.

It is Lenin at the tenth congress. Look it up.


You are under the illusion that it was a black and white thing, and a preconceived plot, concocted by a White mastermind and foisted on the people. This is the mentality behind all you beliefs, eg that the whole revolution was just a plot by a few Bolsheviks.

Er... no I am not. Nor do I think the revolution was a Bolshevik party plot, and I don't think I have ever written anything that would even suggest that.


Which you have said but not demonstrated. What have you produced so far, one anarchist newspaper closed down, allegedly? Lenin refusing to allow freedom of the press for all?

I think that the suppression of anarchists is quite well documented and was much more than one newspaper being closed down. Why not look it up. You could do worse than to start with Averich.


He says "The tasks of the trade unions and of the Soviet power is the isolation of the bourgeois elements who lead strikes and sabotage".

You did read that correctly? And where does he advocate violence? Unfortunately this is not on the net so I cannot verify it. You have a full stop in the middle of the first sentence. He mentions violence, and says it is a BAD THING. So there had been some. You think Lenin and Trotsky could comntrol the actions ove every individual in Russia or something?

You 'support' is a CC member calling for freedom of the press and NO VIOLENCE. You just shot yourself in the foot with that one. Yeah we know there were bits and bobs of violence. Because the workers were doing it in the name of revolution. Just the kinds thing you advocate, it wasnt authorised from above, it was the opposite.

I think the important part was:


Preliminary censorship, the destruction of newspapers, the annihilation of freedom of agitation for the socialist and democratic parties is for us absolutely inadmissible. The closing of the news papers, violence against strikers, etc., irritated open wounds. There has been too much of this type of 'action' recently in the memory of the Russian toiling masses and this can lead to an analogy deadly to the Soviet power.

I quoted at length because I didn't want to quote out of context. What the quote demonstrates is that there was violence against strikers in 1917. Whether the strikes in question were provoked by the bourgeois is a different issue, but it does show that 'the stick had already been raised against the working class.


Please explain what you are trying to say here, I cant fathom it. What has the anarchists joining a bourgeois government got to do with Trotsky's role in the Russian civil war, where his enemy was the bourgeois?

The point here is on the constant Trotsyist refrain of "There was a civil war and famine" as if that was any excuse. Revolutions are always made in times of disruption and chaos. There was a civil war in Spain. As the Trotskyists rightly saw that didn't excuse the anarchists actions. Nor does it excuse the actions of the RCP(B) in Russia.

Devrim

[daft punk]

If you don't like Bourgeois Politicians talking about the Revolution, you might want to check out the real prole opposition by Alexandra Kollontai and the Left Coms

What bourgeois politicians? Kollantai was middle class btw. Ended up one of the few Bolsheviks to survive Stalin.

[daft punk]

I have lived in situation when prices doubled in a matter of hours. I certainly didn't notice any sort of revolutionary situation at the time. If what you were saying were true, there would have been numerous revolutions across the world. Zimbabwe would be a prime example.

Stick a decent Marxist party in Zimbabwe and we could be talking business!




There was no serious plan for revolution in 1923, but even the plan you refer to was, as you say, canceled because even the worst adventurists in the Comintern could see that the situation had passed.
There was a plan for revolution and it was cancelled because the SPD didnt endorse it. Sometimes it is better to try and fail than call a revolution and then cancel it at the last minute because it doesn't come with a money-back guarantee. The KPD was discredited and 10 years later the Nazis were in power. Trotsky was not an adventurist, he led the October revolution.




Serge later had doubts about Kronstadt. I don't think he changed his mind. What you seem to be suggesting is that he deliberately later lied about what had happened to support his point. Either the party lied about it or they didn't. If they didn't it means that Serge, and numerous others did.

I never accused Serge of lying! Nobody was lying, except maybe the ultralefts to some extent, but that was more ignorance than lying.




I think the demands of the Kronstadt Soviet are quite well known. It is worth repeating them here though in case anyone is unaware of them:



I would say that this amounts to a 'conscious programme'. It is true that there are concessions to the peasantry in there. At the time everyone recognised that they were neccesary. However, they go nowhere near as far as the NEP did.

see the Kronstadt thread




I did, and to be honest I was surprised by how little there was that was new in it. It was just the same tired reheated argument.

well it was written in 1938. Read this
http://www.icl-fi.org/english/esp/59/kronstadt.html

scroll down to

A Program of Counterrevolution



I think it is quite strange that you expect people to read your links, but can't be bothered to read a very short pamphlet by Lenin that explains his opinions in full. You can of course look up the relevant phrase if you want.

I have no idea what you are referring to. I even forgot what thread this was for a while there. The thread is about the Left Opposition in 1927. Please make your point with a link and quote in a self contained post as I cannot remember what your link was supposed to show.




It is Lenin at the tenth congress. Look it up.

See above. You need to make your posts self contained, so I dont have to remember who said what and every word of a long thread. If you wanna make a point, make it, dont expect me to be a detective. And if I cant keep track, what about other readers?







I think that the suppression of anarchists is quite well documented and was much more than one newspaper being closed down. Why not look it up. You could do worse than to start with Averich.

I want you to summarise it, with links and quotes or texts paraphrased. You cant debate by just listing links.




I think the important part was:
"Preliminary censorship, the destruction of newspapers, the annihilation of freedom of agitation for the socialist and democratic parties is for us absolutely inadmissible. The closing of the news papers, violence against strikers, etc., irritated open wounds. There has been too much of this type of 'action' recently in the memory of the Russian toiling masses and this can lead to an analogy deadly to the Soviet power. "


I quoted at length because I didn't want to quote out of context. What the quote demonstrates is that there was violence against strikers in 1917. Whether the strikes in question were provoked by the bourgeois is a different issue, but it does show that 'the stick had already been raised against the working class.



The point here is on the constant Trotsyist refrain of "There was a civil war and famine" as if that was any excuse. Revolutions are always made in times of disruption and chaos. There was a civil war in Spain. As the Trotskyists rightly saw that didn't excuse the anarchists actions. Nor does it excuse the actions of the RCP(B) in Russia.

Devrim

Sorry this is wearing me out. Of course the civil war matters! Please provide links with quotes so i can see the context.

So far you have not convinced me that the Bolsheviks were out of order.

Try to do a selfcontained post, one that someone who had not seen this thread could read and be convinced by. All I know is you posted a link to a Lenin article and mentioned some bloke who mentioned something about strikes and it's getting impossible to keep track.

[A Marxist Historian]

That is a bit of an embarrassing mistake.:blushing: Actually though it would reinforce my point. The KPD certainly wasn't under the influence of Left communists at the time as they had all been expelled the previous year. By the way the KAPD was against the March action, which it thought was 'adventurist', but joined in when it occured as they felt they couldn't stand aside.

Devrim

The KPD ws definitely under the influence of "left communist" notions at that point, though not of the KAPD itself. You had what boils down to a faction fight at the Third Comintern Congress in the aftermath, Lenin and Trotsky on one side criticizing the KPD for the March Action, and Zinoviev, Radek, Bukharin I think and the KPD leaders, including Brandler, defending it. Lenin and Trotsky won.

(And so much for the "ban on factions")

-M.H.-

[Devrim]

The KPD ws definitely under the influence of "left communist" notions at that point, though not of the KAPD itself.

I think here you have the results of 'ultraleft' becoming a purely meaningless political insult that was banded around at lots of people to try to 'tar them with the same brush'.

By this point the actual left communists were organised in the KAPD, which was opposed to the March action though took part in it when it happened.

The fact that various insults were thrown around inside the KPD doesn't mean that those accused of being ultraleftists in the KPD were left communists, more that political discussion within the party was pretty stagnant.

Devrim

[A Marxist Historian]

I think here you have the results of 'ultraleft' becoming a purely meaningless political insult that was banded around at lots of people to try to 'tar them with the same brush'.

By this point the actual left communists were organised in the KAPD, which was opposed to the March action though took part in it when it happened.

The fact that various insults were thrown around inside the KPD doesn't mean that those accused of being ultraleftists in the KPD were left communists, more that political discussion within the party was pretty stagnant.

Devrim

Be it noted that at that point the KAPD was still part of the Comintern, and even sent delegates to the 3rd International Congress which focused on discussing the March Action.

Many of the best KAPD folk were returning to the Comintern, after the expulsion of Paul Levy, whose rightist bureaucratism as KPD leader created the KAPD in the first place.

And many of the worst were getting into "National Bolshevism..."

-M.H.-