Interesting website

Hey comrades, here's something you might find interesting (sorry if it's been posted before, I don't think it has).

http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill.../articles.html

The most interesting thing here is

[FONT=Arial]Stalin and Yezhov: An Extra-Paradigmatic View[/FONT]

by a guy called Philip Panaggio.

It's very interesting stuff, though I don't agree with all of it. Don't be put off it if seems a bit weird in parts, there is some good stuff in it too. Other interesting stuff on the site too.

Is this guy revisionist?
EDIT: Never mind. Maybe not.

not he's anti-revisionist but does have some..unusual opinions. definitely worth a read though.

There are some interesting articles on that site, and some weird ones. For example, the article on "Turania" which it claims is vital to understand (I've always understood "Turania" as just another pseudo-scientific nationalist conception...).

There is also some stuff on Lysenkoism, which is a subject that is usually glossed over in articles defending the USSR (Lysenkoism lingered on well beyond Stalin, if I recall correctly). While taking into account the progress in industrialisation and collectivisation, how do we deal with Lysenkoism while proclaiming that socialism brings progress and efficiency?

I came across this by Bill Bland

THE 'DOCTORS' CASE’,
AND, THE DEATH OF STALIN

http://harikumar.brinkster.net/BLAND...CASE_FINAL.htm

I'm not sure if this is linked to on sites like oneparty.co.uk so I thought I'd post it here.

I really think the group should draw up a list of web links to ML sites and pages.

There is also some stuff on Lysenkoism, which is a subject that is usually glossed over in articles defending the USSR (Lysenkoism lingered on well beyond Stalin, if I recall correctly). While taking into account the progress in industrialisation and collectivisation, how do we deal with Lysenkoism while proclaiming that socialism brings progress and efficiency?

Lysenkoism did linger on for the most part until- of all people- Andrei Sakharov criticized him in 1964 for his views. Lysenko was popular only because he believed in Lamarck's idea of certain behaviors being practiced by one individual organism affecting its evolution, which was what Marx and Engels believed in and not Darwin's theory of evolution and genetics. It was a mistaken idea, and unfortunately scientists like Nikolai Vavilov lost their careers (Vavilov died in prison in 1943 from malnutrition, I suspect due to a lack of supplies used for the war effort instead). Lysenko was popular only because he was dogmatically used as a link to Lamarck and Marx and Engels, and thus he was a "revolutionary scientist." I remember Engels once entertained ideas about land bridges and lost continents, long before the theory of continental drift was proposed by Alfred Wegener and plate tectonics (as a matter of fact, "The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man" by Engels talks about the lost continent idea, and Lamarck's theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics.)

The lesson to be learned is that dogmatism can be bad. Otherwise, someone like Nikolai Vavilov would have dominated the biological field in the USSR. And Vavilov was ahead of his time- he talked about how crops were losing their genetic variety due to controlled breeding. This was long before monopoly capitalist organizations like Monsanto got into the business of genetically engineering its crops, and creating corn, bananas, and apples which have absolutely no taste and probably are hazardous to human health.