If Trotsky ran the Soviet Union...

[redcannon]

A hypothetical situation:

suppose the Central Commitee of the Communist Party found Stalin dead in a bathroom from shitting himself to death, and they were left with Trotsky to rule the soviet union.

would Trotsky have done a better job? would the USSR become an authoritarian regime? would the USSR be around today?

[Okocim]

yes, indefinitely so
no
no because the world would be communist!

:hammer:

[Herman]

If Trotsky ran the Soviet Union... everyone would have his ridiculous hair style... and exactly the same beard and mustache (this didn't look ridiculous though)... and they would all wear glasses.

Seriously, I am unsure. Hypothetical situations of the USSR are a mystery for me. You should read the comic 'Red Son', which is about if Superman had landed in the USSR. I haven't read it myself, but it looks interesting :P

[Whitten]

would Trotsky have done a better job? - No, Neo-menshevic policies would have dominated the USSR, and the USSR would not have attempted to progress on to Socialism, instead waiting hopelessly for the west to become socialist.

would the USSR become an authoritarian regime? - Yes, a state-capitalist one.

would the USSR be around today? - Unlikely. I'd be suprised if it made it past the Great Patriotic War.

[Leo]

Do you actually know what Menshevik means?

[UndergroundConnexion]

well indeed like many say history is not predicatable. Yet looking at Stalin's history, it could be predicted what hapened, and Lenin had rightly foreseen this. Although Trotsky had his flaws, I believed that he would have done a better job. This is only base on looking at his pastand personality, and at Stalin's past and personality.

[redcannon]

in a letter to the Central Commitee written by Lenin (on his deathbed), Lenin says:


Comrade Stalin, having become General secretary, has concentrated an enormous power in his hands; and I am not sure that he always knows how to use that power with sufficient caution.

and the postscript at the bottom:

January 4, 1923

Postscript: Stalin is too crude, and this fault, entirely supportable in relations among us Communists, becomes insupportable in the office of General Secretary. Therefore I propose to the comrades to find a way to remove Stalin from that position and appoint to it another man who in all respects differs from Stalin only in superiority-namely, more patient, more loyal, more polite and more attentive to comrades, less capricious, etc. This circumstance may seem an insignificant trifle, but I think that from the point of view of preventing a split and from the point of view of the relation between Stalin and Trotsky which I discussed above, it is not a trifle, or it is such a trifle as may acquire a decisive significance.

from what i hear, Stalin (because he was the General Secretary of the central comittee at the time) got the letter first and censored the parts about him not being a good idea as leader.

[The Grey Blur]

As Marxists we realise that a society is defined by it's mode of production and different classes' relationship to them, not individuals. The whole point of Trotsky's political treatises were to emphasise the class dynamics in the Soviet Union and the material degeneration there (which began even when he was there) and counter simplistic bourgeois analysii.

Trotsky had different political views from Stalin but we can't know exactly how these would have affected the system of governance in the USSR. Trotskyism vs Stalinism is a much deeper debate than this and revolves around a lot of key Marxist issues - ultra-leftism, stageism, organisation.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/wo...37/1937-sta.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1937/1937-sta.htm)

[Marukusu]

Just because Stalin died before he ousted Trotsky from power in the Soviet Union wouldn't automatically make Trotsky the new leader. The politburo hated Trotsky, some perhaps out of jealousy and most of his own "arrogant" style.

But if we hypotethically suppose that Trotsky would have taken power over the Soviet Union instead of Stalin, I don't think things would have differed much from what happened IRL. There would still be a whole lot of trouble with the kulaks, death penalties and working camps (which often are blamed as Stalin's inventions) would still be around. The Soviet Union would also become industiralized sooner or later - I've read somewhere that Trotsky had some ideas similar to the five-year plans.

However, the whole "world revolution" thingy could have messed things up pretty seriously. The Soviet Union had suffered a lot during the WWI and the civil war and the Red Army couldn't even defeat the newly created nation Poland in the Russo-Polish war, something that was neccessary for the revolution to spread to Germany and the rest of Europe (and thus the rest of the world). I think a full-scale invasion against the capitalist states would have been devastating.
Trotsky could, of course, try to further the revolution with more sublte ways such as sponsoring various underground revolutionary movements in Europe, but how that could have ended is impossible to know since we can't change the flux of time.

[redcannon]

Originally posted by [email protected] 08, 2007 12:02 pm
Just because Stalin died before he ousted Trotsky from power in the Soviet Union wouldn't automatically make Trotsky the new leader.

the two main candidates among the Central Committee were Stalin and Trotsky. The other two were considered to young or (as Lenin said) to Marxist in thought.

[Marukusu]

Originally posted by redcannon
the two main candidates among the Central Committee were Stalin and Trotsky. The other two were considered to young or (as Lenin said) to Marxist in thought.

I know that, but I still don't think he would have been elected as general-secretary of the bolshevik party or whatever the title was. Most of the politburo members felt that Trotsky were either to extravagant or utopic and he didn't have their support - something that Stalin had.

[Red7]

With Trotsky, I believe the Soviet Union would have had a very good chance of surviving today. After Lenin died and Trotsky took over, there would be enough true communist fervcr that capitalism and totalitarianism would be forced out... I'd like to think anyway. :unsure: Things would have been better under Trotsky as well. Though they certainly had their differences, Trotsky was very much like Lenin in his sincere love for the worker. Stalin cared nothing for anyone but himself.

[More Fire for the People]

For Trotsky to have made any difference at all a whole Trotskyist faction would have to come to power in the Central Committee. At best one could have hoped that the left-wing of Trotskyists would have increased union and committee autonomy leading to more vocal opposition to state-capitalism and , eventually, the collapse of the state-capitalist system.

[Cryotank Screams]

Originally posted by UndergroundConnexion+March 08, 2007 03:54 pm--> (UndergroundConnexion @ March 08, 2007 03:54 pm) Lenin had rightly foreseen this. [/b]
Lenin often criticized and critiqued Trotsky, and even called him a windbag, and in his letters, he listed Stalin first with one minor critique of him, then listed Trotsky with a vast selection of critiques, and Stalin only fell out of Lenin's favor when Lenin's wife gave him political information, which was forbidden by the doctors and was verbally reprimanded by Stalin, then and only then did Lenin take a anti-Stalin line, because he yelled and cursed at his wife, NOT for political reasons.


Lenin
“It would be extremely harmful to entertain any illusions on this score. If that windbag Trotsky now writes (unfortunately, side by side with Parvus) that a Father Gapon could appear only once,’ that ‘there is no room for a second Gapon,’ he does so simply because he is a windbag. If there were no room in Russia for a second Gapon, there would be no room for a truly ‘great’ consummated democratic revolution.”

and


Comrade Trotsky completely misinterpreted the main idea of my book, What Is To Be Done? when he spoke about the Party not being a conspiratorial organization. He forgot that in my book I propose a number of various types of organizations, from the most secret and most exclusive to comparatively broad and ‘loose’ organizations.

So it is in my opinion Trotsky wouldn't be Lenin's first choice, nor his golden pupil for sucession.

[redcannon]

yes, he might not of liked Trotsky, but he did suggest that the Comittee take the title of General Secretary and exile him from the party.

[OneBrickOneVoice]

Originally posted by [email protected] 08, 2007 08:00 pm
in a letter to the Central Commitee written by Lenin (on his deathbed), Lenin says:


Comrade Stalin, having become General secretary, has concentrated an enormous power in his hands; and I am not sure that he always knows how to use that power with sufficient caution.

and the postscript at the bottom:

January 4, 1923

Postscript: Stalin is too crude, and this fault, entirely supportable in relations among us Communists, becomes insupportable in the office of General Secretary. Therefore I propose to the comrades to find a way to remove Stalin from that position and appoint to it another man who in all respects differs from Stalin only in superiority-namely, more patient, more loyal, more polite and more attentive to comrades, less capricious, etc. This circumstance may seem an insignificant trifle, but I think that from the point of view of preventing a split and from the point of view of the relation between Stalin and Trotsky which I discussed above, it is not a trifle, or it is such a trifle as may acquire a decisive significance.

from what i hear, Stalin (because he was the General Secretary of the central comittee at the time) got the letter first and censored the parts about him not being a good idea as leader.
actually that text can't be verified as actually written by Lenin. It was neither signed by Lenin as all other works he had written, nor was is presented by him. Also, keep in mind, he was extremely sick at this point and that Stalin offered his resignation yet thge central committee rejected it Trotsky included!

[R_P_A_S]

Originally posted by [email protected] 08, 2007 07:49 pm
would Trotsky have done a better job? - No, Neo-menshevic policies would have dominated the USSR, and the USSR would not have attempted to progress on to Socialism, instead waiting hopelessly for the west to become socialist.

would the USSR become an authoritarian regime? - Yes, a state-capitalist one.

would the USSR be around today? - Unlikely. I'd be suprised if it made it past the Great Patriotic War.
damn.. where do they sell crystal balls that look into the future?

[R_P_A_S]

Stalin was a damn hater

[Labor Shall Rule]

He would of never ran the Soviet Union if Stalin unexpectingly died while squeezing out excrements. As Permanent Revolution makes clear, the material conditions that existed within the country at that time placed the bureaucracy into the privileged position of the ruling stratum. Through years of prolonged degeneration, the Soviet state and revolutionary party was strangled by the petty bourgeois and peasant elements. Therefore, Trotsky would not of replaced Stalin in the event that he died, because he would have to gain accountability amongst these class forces before he was elevated to such a position, and he did not possess such a thing.

His political convictions were made clear with his membership in the Left Opposition. What he was demanding, the reestablishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, would of course be universally opposed by these factions of the state that acted in accordance to the interests of the bureaucracy, rather than the working class.