Stalinism

[Qwerty Dvorak]

Well, you all know how Stalin is generally portayed, i.e. a paranoid megalomaniac nutjob who set communism back no end, and killed thousands if not millions of good people to secure his own tyrannical grip on power...

Well, I'm not saying he wasnt, but I was just wondering if Stalinists accept and support the generally accepted image of him (obviously not that he was a psychopath, but that he was extremely ruthless and that he killed a lot of people), or if they dispute it, i.e. they dont believe he did all the things he is claimed to have done, or that he was really as ruthless as people said.

I would like answers and opinions from both Stalinists and non-Stalinists, and please don't bother replying with something like 'stalinism sucks'. I'm not saying you're wrong, but that kind of talk helps noone.

:D

[Un-Amäraкin Bastard]

Originally posted by [email protected] 5 2005, 01:56 AM
Well, you all know how Stalin is generally portayed, i.e. a paranoid megalomaniac nutjob who set communism back no end, and killed thousands if not millions of good people to secure his own tyrannical grip on power...

Well, I'm not saying he wasnt, but I was just wondering if Stalinists accept and support the generally accepted image of him (obviously not that he was a psychopath, but that he was extremely ruthless and that he killed a lot of people), or if they dispute it, i.e. they dont believe he did all the things he is claimed to have done, or that he was really as ruthless as people said.

I would like answers and opinions from both Stalinists and non-Stalinists, and please don't bother replying with something like 'stalinism sucks'. I'm not saying you're wrong, but that kind of talk helps noone.

:D
I believe they do not support his activities (slaughtering 22 million Russians), but his ideals and his improvments upon Russia. He did set Communism back so far that another successful revolution is expected to be delayed for a few centuries, but he did show that Communism did provide the fastest recorded industrialization in history (although no country has ever been in Communism by definition) because of the ways he worked things. I do not know the basics of Stalinism, but I know they follow his principles (I do not think that you'll find may Stalinists outside of Opposing Idiologies anyway). In essence, he helped keep Russia on the map...

[danny android]

Some do deny that any of the deaths even happened, which is fairly similar to the neo-nazi movement in amerika which denies that the holocaust never happened. Many supporters of stalin also say that yes the deaths did happen but they were not his fault and the fact that people died because of stalin is acceptable because of all the great things stalin did(creating the USSR into a super power). In my opinion all authoritarian forms of government are counter-revolutionary and Stalin's USSR is no different.

[Erythromycin-diazepam]

Stalin sucks :) :P

[Poum_1936]

Hear! Hear!

Stalin died. Ohhhh Booo hoooooo.

[Hiero]

"stalinist" don't call themselves Stalinist or say there is a such a thing as Stalinism.

"stalinist" accept there was famine and that there were purges, though it is quite obvious these are over exagerated numbers.

What Stalin supporters do is use a Marxist-Leninist outlook to study the Stalin era of the USSR, rather the bourgeois outlook which blames every action on a individual and then conclude these actions were aviodable if only that person wasn't "paranoid" or has some form of mental condtion. Stalin supporters acknowledge the whole leadership of the CPSU, not the false idea that Stalin lead the Soviet Union alone.

I will mention some cases where this outlook has been used.

In the case of the 1932-3 Ukraine famine, rather then make up some false statement about Stalin's hatered for the Ukraine or some other idea pulled out of the air, we look at the class war against the urban proleteriat and peasants against the kulaks. The Kulaks who were against collectivisation as they benifited from private ownership burnt and hid surplus grain and livestock or got peasants to do the same. This was setting the scene for a oncoming famine, and was going to result in food shorgates no doubt.

Any food that was taking from the Kulaks was done rightfully, why should they be allowed to have food and while others starve when they were wasting and hiding food?

About the purges i would say you do not stop suppresing our enemies when they reach a high number. Purges were neccassary, as people inside the party were trying to revert to capitalist, or trying to implement some soft socialism. This is evident with Krushchev who's reforms allowed comodoty trading to take.

Stalin's supporters see the USSR in Stalin's time as a generally a good thing for the proletarait which advance their position and living standards while keeping a Marxist-Leninist government that furthered the class war for the benifit for the proletariat.

However most have criticism, it is a lie that people actually worship Stalin.


He did set Communism back so far that another successful revolution is expected to be delayed for a few centuries

Are you delusional? Post War was an era of national liberation and many Communist revolutions. Many looked to the USSR as a model economy.

[sanpal]

Originally posted by Un-Amäraкin [email protected] 5 2005, 04:10 AM
I do not know the basics of Stalinism, but I know they follow his principles
The basics of Stalinism (in spite of marxist-leninist terminology used by stalinists) are:

A) incorrect interpretation of marxist theory and as effect -

B) incorrect economic policy;

C) incorrect realization of political system;

If new communists will repeat stalinists mistakes they will get new Stalin(s). And it will be objectively.

[Comrade Yastrebkov]

Why can't new communists repeat stalin's good points rather than his mistakes? Anyone thought of that?

[Waffler]

I think alot of Stalin's good points were directly related to his bad points. I think he got alot done, but the cost was too great in my opinion.

Its hard to just take the good points.

[Comrade Marcel]

I'm not going to bother much, because most of you comrades have no fucking clue - with the exception of Hiero - and are just regurgitating either Trotskyite or bourgeois falsities, or a mixture of both.

What I find most dangerous and sickening is the way danny android has fallen for neop-nazis and fascistic hegemony, as perpetueted in bourgeois academia in and spread by bourgeois "scholars" right-wing economicists seeking ways to justify imperialism, and anti-communists.

The idea that Stalin killed 7 million (or more) Ukrainians by engineering a forced famine was concieved by Nazis. It was repeated in the western media by the Hearst Enterprise (Inquirer), Hearst was a friend of Hitler and part of the circle of borugeois supporters of fascism and nazism that existed in ameriKKKa before they entered WW II. This is a fact. Those who repeat these numbers today, usually quote those sources (either fascist or second hand from fascists). Ask where these numbers come from. And ask why they are always made to be higher than the amount of Jews that died in the Holocaust.

Same goes with the alleged 20 million dead Soviet people, who supposedly where executed or died in Gulags under Stalin. Where's the proof? And who are these numbers coming from? Well, Robert Conquest (who worked for the MI6) and Solzynitsyn (a fascist).

When we look at numbers from Yale, and the Soviet archives we see a different story.

But to compare this to Nazism, something based on race, genocide, and eugenics, that sought out specific ethnicities, people with disbilities and communists to be eliminated for a fascist, neo-Darwinist agenda is twisted. Fascism is capitalism, imperialism and nationalism to the extreme. Whiping out counter-revolutionaries in the name of socialism, internation communism and defeating fascism is just not comparable. For shame! You insult and spit on all those Jews, communists, Gypsies, Slavs, Africans, etc. who died under the nazi jackboot. Stalin was a hero!

Check out this study guide that I compiled last year:

http://individual.utoronto.ca/mrodden/study/ssustudy.html

[Wanted Man]

Originally posted by danny [email protected] 6 2005, 03:35 AM
Some do deny that any of the deaths even happened, which is fairly similar to the neo-nazi movement in amerika which denies that the holocaust never happened.
Which is funny, considering that the Nazis and their friends, as Comrade Marcel said, actually had quite a lot of interest in inflating the number of "people killed by Stalin"(a notion which is ridiculous in itself). The difference between the Nazis and the Bolsheviks is that the bourgeoisie would have picked Hitler over Stalin any day if he would have been able to defeat Stalin. The bourgeoisie and its supporters(or even those on the "moderate left", or even the trotskyites(whom I have nothing against, but some are just extremely eager to bloat Stalin's death count because of their ideological differences with him)), although they do not acknowledge it, have a direct interest in making Stalin(and Mao, or even Lenin for that matter!) look worse than Hitler. How often do you not hear of people whose top 3 of "evil" people is like this?

1: Mao
2: Stalin
3: Hitler

Of course, they still have to tell others that they think Hitler was terrible, because Nazi apologism undermines their views, but the bottomline is that communists are worse.


Solzynitsyn (a fascist)
Haha, I just loved when the bourgeoisie suddenly kept a lot more quiet about him when he publicly spoke out in favour of Franco and/or Salazar(not sure who, or both...). :lol:

[Comrade Yastrebkov]

I agree with comrades Hiero and Marcel - the numbers about "stalin's purges" the "dozens of millions" killed or starved to death are certainly false. Soviet archival evidence speaks otherwise.

The numbers killed were high, but not in the tens or even in the millions - the figure is small compared to the amount of deaths US foreign policy has caused.

Also this talk of hundreds of millions incarcerated in soviet gulags - archival evidence shows that at any one time there were twice as many prisoners as in the US. Yes, twice as many, but not ten times like so many anticommunists make out.

[TheComrade]

There is no justification for any sort of 'Purge.' The death of any number of peoples’ is wrong. There were no trials for these so called 'anti communists' - and any that did take place were unfair and pre-decided. In fact the Purges are as bad if not worse than the Anti-Communist trials of America - at least the victims of that weren’t starved - worked to death - or given cancer for medical experiments!

Just to clarify - I do not believe in Capitalism - I loath the USA but I see no alternative in a Stalinist form of Communism - I think Stalin abused the good intentions of Marx for his own, entirely selfish purposes.

[Morpheus]

Originally posted by Comrade [email protected] 7 2005, 05:20 PM
The numbers killed were high, but not in the tens or even in the millions - the figure is small compared to the amount of deaths US foreign policy has caused.
My, what high standards you have. Doing better than US foreign policy doesn't say much. Even Adolf Hitler killed less than US foreign policy.

[sovietsniper]

Originally posted by Comrade [email protected] 7 2005, 03:50 AM

Check out this study guide that I compiled last year:

http://individual.utoronto.ca/mrodden/study/ssustudy.html


thats quite good

[Poum_1936]

I'm not going to bother much, because most of you comrades have no fucking clue

I love the free exchange of ideas. Perhaps there is a way to "ignore" certain users? So we dont have to put up with different ideas.

To hell with that old outdated slogan "patiently explain."

[Comrade Marcel]

Originally posted by [email protected] 9 2005, 02:39 AM

I'm not going to bother much, because most of you comrades have no fucking clue

I love the free exchange of ideas. Perhaps there is a way to "ignore" certain users? So we dont have to put up with different ideas.

To hell with that old outdated slogan "patiently explain."
I'm in no way suppressing your speech, so WTF are you crying about?

This subject has been debated to death on here and everywhere else. Go ahead and post your reply, but if it's the same old crap I'm not going to bother. I have other things to attend to, like real actual organizing. Someone else on here can bother if the like.

BTW, it's "Stalinists" who are outcast on this site, in case you haven't noticed.

I'm perfectly willing to "patiently explain" things to my 52 year old mother who can't concentrate on reading, or a young communist 16 years or younger, for example. Everyone else can read a fucking book.

[tatu]

Check out the following links:

Here (http://www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/faq/lifeexpectussr2.html), here (http://www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/im/stalin50th.html), here (http://www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/faq/stalindeaths.html) and here (http://www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/bookstore/commie.html).

[tatu]

Sorry, I've double posted.

[Wanted Man]

Statistics of GULAG prisoners from State Archive of Russian Federation, d. 2740, l. 1, 5, 8, 14, 26, 38, 42, 48, 58, 96-110. The high percentages of death come from 1933, when there was a drought, and 1942-1943, the highest point of the Great Patriotic War. Quite a bit different from the "110 bajillion people murdered by Stalin!!!!!!!!" propagated by the bourgeosie.


Year Average number of prisoners Died Percentage
1931 240.350 7283 3,03
1932 301.500 13267 4,40
1933 422.304 67297 15,94
1934 617.895 26295 4,26
1935 782.445 28328 3,62
1936 830.144 20595 2,48
1937 908.624 25376 2,79
1938 1.156.781 90546 7,83
1939 1.330.802 50502 3,79
1940 1.422.466 46665 3,28
1941 1.458.060 100997 6,93
1942 1.199.785 248877 20,74
1943 823.784 166967 20,27
1944 689.550 60948 8,84
1945 658.202 43848 6,66
1946 704.868 18154 2,58
1947 958.448 35668 3,72
1948 1.316.331 15739 1,20
1949 1.475.034 14703 1,00
1950 1.622.485 15587 0,96
1951 1.719.586 13806 0,80

[FalceMartello]

If one desires a real good account of Stalin they should the following books:

Anything by Anna Louise Strong
Molotov Remembers: Conversations recored by Felix Chuev with Molotov

Any other book on Stalin/the Stalin Era is worthless.

[anomaly]

Hmm, I've read rather different things about Stalin from socialist thinkers. I do not much care for Stalin, but, of course, I much prefer Trotsky, and Stalin had Trotsky exiled. Stalin also was an anti-semite. And having a record better than that of US foreign policy is, as one comrade noted, nothing of which to be proud.

That being said, I do acknowledge that you Stalinists have a point: Stalin is not the lone culprit, but rather blame must go to the entire Soviet government of the era. But understand that this finger-pointing towards Stalin alone isn't something unique in history. We like to be able to blame one person, and so we blame the most powerful of the accused. And Stalin was the premier, after all.

[FalceMartello]

anti-semite

This is definitly wrong. In Molotovs book there are quite a few pages dedicated to this topic and he definitly despells this lie. There was actually a movie made by citizens of the Jewish Autonomous Republic (which Stalin helped establish) called L'Chaim Comrade Stalin in which they praised him for helping set up the JAR.

I'm not a Stalinist (nor a Leninist for that matter). I do not support Stalin, nor the USSR. Both did some pretty good and progressive things which I support (a good read is Anna Louise Strong's Workers' Life in Soviet Russia), but neither set up a true socialism. I do believe that Stalin is portrayed in a absurd light and there has been a ferocious propaganda war to blacken him. He's really quite different, although some things are quite the same.

[RedSabine]

I don't think Stalin did any good for communism, scoialism, or anyother communist- derived idealogy, but did great things for the U.S.S.R when it needed to be industrialized.

[Wanted Man]

Originally posted by [email protected] 15 2005, 12:26 AM
That being said, I do acknowledge that you Stalinists have a point: Stalin is not the lone culprit, but rather blame must go to the entire Soviet government of the era. But understand that this finger-pointing towards Stalin alone isn't something unique in history. We like to be able to blame one person, and so we blame the most powerful of the accused. And Stalin was the premier, after all.

Hmm, I've read rather different things about Stalin from socialist thinkers. I do not much care for Stalin, but, of course, I much prefer Trotsky, and Stalin had Trotsky exiled.
Why "of course"?


Stalin also was an anti-semite.
As pointed out by comrade Martello, this is quite false. Note this, too:

http://www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/classics...talinonjews.txt (http://www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/classics/text.php?mimfile=Stalinonjews.txt)


That being said, I do acknowledge that you Stalinists have a point: Stalin is not the lone culprit, but rather blame must go to the entire Soviet government of the era. But understand that this finger-pointing towards Stalin alone isn't something unique in history. We like to be able to blame one person, and so we blame the most powerful of the accused. And Stalin was the premier, after all.
He was the General Secretary. A powerful position within the Party, but it never gave him sole power over the entire country. He still had to go through the Politburo, agree with Party members and such. To hold him personally accountable for tens of millions of people or so is ridiculous.

[black magick hustla]

I like how having a bad perception about stalin is being a trotskyte or a bourgeosie. :lol:

[sovietsniper]

Stalin did what had to be done.Didnt he once say"if we dont cath up to the west in 10 years we will be chrused" in 1931 to promote industriassathion.what happend 10 years later in 41?
There is also the fact that when he done all this was done nobody had a clue what communist society would look like,it had never been tried before

[tatu]

http://www.plp.org/books/Stalin/book.html