a couple random thoughts on Joseph Stalin

[Os Cangaceiros]

I've been reading casually a bit about the USSR, and a couple thoughts regarding Stalin came to me. Although I'm very much opposed to Stalin and his actions historically, actually both of these things could be argued to be positives:

For one, Stalin prior to his ascent to real power seems to me just to have been another boring Soviet bureaucrat. He didn't seem exceptional and he didn't seem to delude himself that he was. This was opposed to Trotsky, who had a huge ego and who many people thought was a raging hard-on.

It gives me hope that even unexceptional, middling people can claw their way to the top and crush their enemies. It's actually pretty inspiring.

Another thing was that, although many, many injustices were commited during Stalin's tenure, I think there was also probably a great deal of justice done. Stalin made sure that plenty of the people in the NKVD and Soviet bureaucracy who kept society the way it was met untimely ends. Take Nikolai Yezhov, for example. That guy was a total piece of shit who deserved a bullet in the back of his worthless skull, and through Stalin this very thing was arranged!

Honestly, had Stalin shot Beria personally, and then managed to somehow shoot himself in the back of the head at some point, I would probably have a much more positive view of him.

[Rafiq]

Yeah, but really I don't buy into this "The purges were done because Stalin was power hungry". I do really think there was a genuine amount of paranoia existent within the Soviet state not simply about people who would "challenge their sinister dictatorship" but of people "sabotaging the developments of socialism in the USSR" and so on. Let's make something very clear, the Soviet Union was constantly under siege by other capitalist powers and unlike Nazi Germany, a great deal of espionage and the likes existed within the USSR, despite the fact that the Soviet union retained economic and trade relations with foreign powers. The great purges were not a result of Stalin's own paranoia, but of the inevitable mass paranoia which resulted from the Soviet Union's isolation. It is true that a great many in the purges were wrongly persecuted and executed, and this as a fact should never be dismissed or ignored. But many are very keen in ignoring the fact that not everybody was killed for no reason, some of them did pose a real threat to the Soviet state, now whether we as Communists should care is something else all together. It's important for us not to fall into this trap, of portraying Stalin as some "Great fatherly man" who in his heart wanted to retain a worker's dictatorship but was hindered by evil, opportunistic bureaucrats. There can be no doubt Stalin sought to see to retaining the existence of the USSR. But in turn, in this processes of protecting the Soviet state, the power of the proletariat was completely liquidated. For the only way a country, a state surrounded by hostile (or even non hostile) capitalist powers to survive is for it to succumb to the interests of capital.