My notes and quotes I've collected

Would it be worthwhile to categorize these quotes in some manner? Like, quotes related to Trotsky/Trotskyism, quotes related to socialism in one country, etc?

I think a lot of new Marxist-Leninists may find the information rather daunting in its unorganized state. This might cause them to miss out on information that could answer a potential question of theirs.

Perhaps.

Hubert Humphrey on his December 1958 meeting with Khrushchev:

"'Without getting into the ally business,' I said, 'I'd like to ask one question about the new communes [in China].'

Khrushchev's response was possibly the most interesting part of the whole interview. He said, 'They are old-fashioned, they are reactionary. We tried it right after the Revolution. It just doesn't work. That system is not nearly so good as the state farms and the collective farms. You know, Senator, what those communes are based on? They are based on that principle 'From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.' You know that won't work. You can't get production without incentive.'

I could hardly believe that the leader of world communism was rejecting the core of Marxist theory. I said simply, 'That is rather capitalistic.' Khrushchev replied, 'Call it what you will. It works.'"
(Humphrey, Hubert H. The Education of a Public Man: My Life and Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1991. pp. 146-147.)

"Trotsky's supporters... creat[ed] the impression that it was not Lenin's theory of socialist revolution, but Trotsky's 'permanent revolution' writings that constituted the basis of the Bolshevik Party's strategy and tactics of the October Revolution...

The Party's documents and the works of Lenin helped to destroy the myth of Trotsky's ideological kinship with the Bolshevik Party and Lenin from early 1917 on. Actually, Trotsky's activity in the USA, his writing for Novy mir, a newspaper of socialist émigrés from Russia, provided firm evidence that at the time Trotsky had joined the Rightist group and had together with them attacked the Bolsheviks and all Leftist supporters of Zimmerwald. That is precisely why, in a letter to A.M. Kollontai on February 17, 1917, Lenin urged exposure of Trotsky's subversive activity behind a screen of 'Left' talk.

Speaking subsequently at the Petrograd City Conference of the RSDLP(B) on May 5, 1917, Lenin sharply condemned the proposal put forward by some Party comrades to set up, during the municipal elections, a bloc of Bolsheviks and men like Chkheidze and Trotsky. Lenin told the conference: 'Who are we to form a bloc with?. . . Chkheidze is the worst screen for defencism. When publishing his paper in Paris, Trotsky failed to make clear whether he was for or against Chkheidze. We have always spoken out against Chkheidze, because he is a fine screen for chauvinism. Trotsky failed to dot his i's'.

In that period another document of Lenin's—a plan he wrote after May 6 for a pamphlet he intended to write about the April Conference—also urged the need to combat Trotsky's line. In the new conditions, he said, the Party's main task was to combat the petty-bourgeois vacillations in the coming revolution, which was bound to be a 'thousand times stronger than the February revolution'. Among those who expressed these vacillations, Lenin said, was Trotsky.

Before joining the Party, Trotsky had organisational links with the conciliators and opponents of Bolshevism. As for Trotsky's letters from the USA, they had nothing in common with Lenin's theory of socialist revolution. In his letters he re-asserted the fundamentally incorrect, anti-Party slogan of 'No tsar, but a workers' government', which meant a revolution without the peasantry, and a leaping over the stage of democratic revolution.

Lenin at once found it necessary to draw a line between his own and Trotsky's extremely adventurous stand. In his 'Letters on Tactics' (April 1917), he made a point of emphasising that Trotsky's slogan was wrong for it failed to reckon with the motive forces and the pace of the revolution. Lenin qualified the 'No Tsar, but a workers' government' slogan as a 'playing at 'seizure of power'', as a 'kind of Blanquist adventurism'."
(Ignatyev, V.L. (ed). The Bolshevik Party's Struggle Against Trotskyism in the Post-October Period. Moscow: Progress Publishers. 1969. pp. 156-157.)

"Enrico Berlinguer, General Secretary of the Italian Communist Party, said that the recent meetings between the Italian and Chinese Communist Parties had achieved positive results...

'Thanks to the wide range of information given to us and through our visit [Berlinguer said], we have discovered that in the remote past, and not long ago, the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese people encountered innumerable grave difficulties and that they are making enormous efforts to make their socialist China a more stable, more progressive and more modernized state with each passing day. We greatly admire your efforts and wholeheartedly wish you success.' ...

Answering questions raised by some journalists on the differences between the Italian and Chinese Communist Parties, Comrade Berlinguer said: 'We do not agree to regard the Soviet Union as an enemy. But we want to add that neither do we agree to regard China as an enemy.' ...

What is known as 'Eurocommunism' is the search for a road to socialism, proceeding from the particular conditions of European capitalism, Comrade Berlinguer added. This road is different from the road of the European social democratic parties and also from that of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The distinguishing feature of 'Eurocommunism' is shown in the fact that people are fully cognizant of the results of freedom and democracy already attained in these countries of Western Europe."
(Beijing Review No. 18 Vol. 23 (May 5, 1980). pp. 23-24.)

"'The Yugoslav Revolution is a great historical feat in Europe,' wrote Santiago Carrillo, emphasizing its contribution 'to the constructive work of rethinking the meaning of socialism.'"
(Leonhard, Wolfgang. Eurocommunism: Challenge for East and West. New York: Holy, Rinehart, and Winston. 1979. p. 58.)

From The Newsletter, a 1957-58 journal edited by Peter Fryer, a liberal within the CPGB who turned into a kind of Trot after the events in Hungary. This bit is interesting chiefly because it shows the positive view many anti-"Stalinists" had of the "moderate" Mao:

"MAO'S SPEECH CHALLENGES MOSCOW
A Newsletter Analysis

THE speech by Mao Tse-tung on 'The Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People' deserves the most serious attention and the qualified support of communists and socialists throughout the world.

The speech is not only an analysis of the fundamental problems of socialist construction in a backward country, but also—and this is more important—it constitutes an implicit challenge to the Soviet rulers for the ideological leadership of the communist world....

7) PLANNING
Mao seems to realize that the government cannot handle and administer everything...

8) 'LETTING A HUNDRED FLOWERS BLOOM'
This is the most interesting and important section of the speech....

12) INDUSTRIALIZATION
Mao tries to establish the relations between light industry, heavy industry and agriculture, and speaks of the potentially vast market for heavy industry in agricultural development and the necessity for inducing a correspondingly greater development in light industry during the second and third five-year plans.

This belated retreat from Soviet methods of planning will be welcomed by the workers and peasants of China."
(The Newsletter Vol. 1 No. 8. June 29, 1957. p. 57.)

From a post of mine back in May:

"Marx invariably contrasts capitalism and communism with the utmost clarity, and makes it clear that two phases may be distinguished in the future system - socialism and communism - and that between that system and capitalism there lies a transition period in which the state takes the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It clearly follows, therefore, that under socialism there no longer is a dictatorship of the proletariat, there are no classes or class exploitation, etc., and Stalin's idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat under socialism is nothing but an anti-Marxist thesis, one more feature of his reactionary state-capitalist ideology, in which the term dictatorship of the proletariat really means the dictatorship of the bureaucracy."
(Horvat, Branko. An Essay on Yugoslav Society. New York: International Arts and Sciences Press. 1969. p. 57.)

"In opposition to the viewpoints of the modern revisionists, who have hidden the class struggle from the life of the society and only speak about the unity of this society, our Party upholds the Marxist-Leninist viewpoint that the class struggle continues not only during the period of the transition from capitalism to socialism, when the exploiting classes still exist, but also after their liquidation as classes, during the whole period of the construction of socialist society and the transition to communism, remaining one of the main motive forces of society.

... Experience shows that... the sharp edge of the class struggle is not directed mainly or only to the external front... Even within the country this struggle is not directed only against the remnants of the exploiting classes and their agents or the foreign enemies, spies, saboteurs, and diversionists, but this struggle is extended even to the ranks of the people and the Party, it acts in all fields of political, economic, ideological and cultural, organizational and military life."
(Foto Çami in Some Questions of Socialist Construction in Albania and of the Struggle Against Revisionism. Tirana: Naim Frashëri Publishing House. 1971. pp. 99-101.)

"Lenin supported with scientific arguments the possibility of the victory of socialism in a single country and laid the basis of the plan for the construction of socialist society. Life verified the correctness of the ideas of Lenin. Stalin further developed the Leninist theory of the socialist revolution. He emphasized that the bourgeoisie can be overthrown and the complete socialist society built with the internal forces of the people of the country of the triumphant revolution, but this victory, he pointed out, could not be called final while there still existed the capitalist encirclement and, therefore consequently, the danger of aggression and the restoration of capitalism. Although it was onesided for the lack of historical experience, this conclusion of Stalin, also, has been completely verified by practice."
(Ibid. p. 103.)

"It would certainly be wrong to suggest that the Cominform and individual communist parties did not commit errors or take measures that did in fact impede, to a degree, co-operation between the Communists and the Social-Democrats and that hampered the workers' movement to achieve unity. Errors, unfortunately, were committed. In the context of intensified struggles in the world and in individual European countries, when right-wing Socialists pursued increasingly overt anti-Soviet and anti-communist policies, sectarian tendencies reappeared in the communist movement, which undoubtedly impeded co-operation between the communist and social-democratic parties.

The violation of human rights along with certain mistakes made by the influence of Joseph Stalin's personality cult not only in the Soviet Union but also in the countries of people's democracy should be also taken into account. Preparing and effecting the merger of workers' parties in the countries of people's democracy, the Communists committed certain errors, by being prone at times to bureaucracy, haste and sectarian intolerance vis-Ã*-vis the workers who were members of social-democratic parties. All this evoked the displeasure of Social-Democrats, undermined their confidence in the communist parties and fostered anti-Soviet and anti-communist sentiment in social-democratic parties.

Among the serious reasons behind the anti-Soviet and anti-communist tendencies within the social-democratic ranks were the erroneous actions taken by Soviet state bodies and Joseph Stalin personally with respect to Yugoslavia. This contributed to a split in the workers' movement and the spread of anti-communist views in social-democratic parties. The errors committed by the Communists in those years are still being used by right Socialists to stir Social-Democrats to mistrust the present course of communist parties, a course towards united actions and co-operation with the Socialists."
(Sibilev, Nikolai. The Socialist International. Moscow: Progress Publishers. 1984. pp. 23-24.)

"The 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Meeting of Representatives of the Communist and Workers' Parties of the Socialist Countries held in Moscow in 1957 had a significant impact on the ideological activity of the Social-Democrats. At first, the right-wing forces succeeded in enhancing anti-communist propaganda and fostering anti-communist prejudices in social-democratic parties by referring to the criticism of Stalin's personality cult and its consequences. However, the anti-communist fog gradually cleared and by the late 1950s and early 1960s, many Social-Democrats had become more sober-minded in assessing new ideas and approaches to the class struggle which were formulated by the Communists."
(Ibid. p. 50.)

Although there is an amusing quote on the part of French social-democracy, especially in light of the fact that it was the rise of working-class activity that brought about the "nationalism" that the French social-democrats were condemning:

"No longer able to avoid discussing the Algerian issue, the Socialist International was forced to include it on the agenda of its Fifth Congress held in Vienna in 1957... Pierre Commin, addressing the Congress, declared unequivocally that the French Socialist Party had no intention of granting independence to Algeria and tried to justify this position theoretically. He said: 'We Socialists refuse to believe that the phase of nationalism is a means of bringing about the liberation of man. On the contrary, it is the duty of Socialists to help to avoid that dangerous phase and, instead, to advance towards a higher form of co-operation between colonial and metropolitan peoples. . . We should fail in our mission if we simply allowed nationalism to run its course instead of trying to direct developments in accordance with our Socialist doctrine.'"
(Ibid. p. 169.)

The Soviet ambassador to Cuba writing the following in 1979: "In a private conversation with F. Castro, the Yugoslav leader tried to convince him that Yugoslavia's policies could not be considered anti-Soviet at all, and, in particular, stated that he did not allow anti-Soviet books to be published in Yugoslavia, assuming he knew of their content in advance." - http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/111249

"One thing that impressed me in observing [Yugoslav] enterprises was the deference paid to the manager by the employees as we walked through the shop floor. The relation was the same as in a capitalist enterprise, even though in principle the manager was hired by the workers rather than the other way around. In practice, the manager was chosen by a managing committee selected by the workers for a term of some years. It was in the workers' self-interest to choose a competent manager."
(Friedman, Milton and Rose D. Friedman. Two Lucky People: Memoirs. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 1998. p. 424.)

"Socialist countries... provide a guarantee protecting the progressive transformations being implemented in these countries and shielding revolutionary political regimes from encroachment on the part of the imperialists. Precisely this support from the socialist community and its active struggle against the imperialists provide a vital basis for non-capitalist development and indeed make it possible. The sooner and more fully national democrats grasp this the better prospects for non-capitalist development will be.

The idea that the non-capitalist path of development only became possible thanks to the support of the socialist community is not merely an important theoretical statement. It is of great practical and political significance. It underlies the strategic line of the relations between the socialist countries and the national-democratic forces in the former colonies....

The objective need for co-operation between the socialist countries and the national democracy makes specific demands on the latter. The foreign policy tenets and concepts which at one time served as a common platform for all Third World countries now require to be developed and defined more precisely. Positive neutrality and non-interference can no longer be interpreted as an effort to steer a course of balance between the two systems... Reversion to this theory is still to be found amongst certain national democrats and leads to a certain mistrust of the socialist countries and the isolationist slogan calling for 'self-reliance', etc."
(Ulyanovsky, R. Socialism and the Newly Independent Nations. Moscow: Progress Publishers. 1974. pp. 64-65.)

"The historical experience shows that the non-capitalist way of development is a type of transition to socialism in the epoch of the existence of a world socialist system under which the stage of democratic transformation—a stage no backward country can escape—is being carried out under the leadership of revolutionary democrats, some of whom may adopt scientific socialism in the course of these transformations. A point to note is that revolutionary democrats can play the leading political role in the countries with a relatively weak proletariat...

A thing to emphasise is that the world socialist system is the decisive anti-imperialist force. Were it not for the socialist countries' inspiring example and their material and political backing, the progressive potentialities of revolutionary democracy would have lacked the socialist prospects they now have. Consequently, unity and co-operation between the revolutionary-democratic forces in power in some of the young states and the countries of the world socialist system are a vital condition for their successful advance to socialism."
(Lenin and National Liberation in the East. Moscow: Progress Publishers. 1978. pp. 19-20.)

An old but good post by Woland on economic progress under Stalin (in the context of ComradeOm claiming Khrushchev bettered the conditions of Soviet workers by dismantling the "Stalinist coercive economy"): http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.p...4&postcount=58

Just some quotes testifying to the lameness of Togliatti.

"As the Second World War drew to a close, the Italian Communist Party (PCI) began to define and pursue a 'terza via al socialismo', a third road to socialism...

In a celebrated speech to the newly liberated people of Naples in April 1944, Togliatti offered the first statement of the terza via... [he] warned against the dangers of isolation: 'We can no longer be a small, tightly knit association of propagandists. . . . We have to be a big party, a mass party', reaching out beyond its traditional constituency to embrace a wide variety of anti-fascist forces, from peasants and intellectuals to the 'productive bourgeoisie'—artisans, clerical and professional workers, even small industrialists. This would be a 'party of unity', with no room for 'exclusivist and sectarian narrowmindedness'.

[....]

Togliatti, emboldened by the resulting climate of doubt and criticism [from the 20th Party Congress], was now prepared to make explicit what had already been implicit in the PCI's modus operandi. His views were famously expressed in a lengthy interview given to the journal Nuovi Argomenti. The pursuit of world socialism, he declared, was 'becoming polycentric' and further progress meant 'following roads which are often different'. Each communist party should respond to its own country's unique configuration of values, conventions, and social forces. There was no universal formula for realizing the good society. Attempts to impose socialism through a set of ready-made prescriptions would lead to 'bureaucratic degeneration, . . . the suffocation of democratic life, . . . and the destruction of revolutionary legality'. These remarks, though hedged about with tributes to the heroic and world-historic achievements of the USSR, betrayed profound misgivings about Soviet 'democracy', which, the PCI boss implied, had become detached from 'the creative activity of the masses'...

In his final text, known as the ''Yalta Memorandum'' (published just before his death in 1964), Togliatti edged further away from orthodoxy by effectively endorsing Kautsky's defence of parliaments and civil liberties. It might be possible, he conceded, 'for the working classes to win positions of power within the limits of a state that has not changed its bourgeois nature' and therefore 'to struggle for the progressive transformation of its nature from the inside'. Parliament, it seemed, could have a greater or lesser degree of democratic representativeness and legitimacy. He also expressed his disapproval of the dogmatism and repression that had marred the Soviet experiment. Communists 'must become the champions of the freedom of intellectual life, of free artistic creation, and of scientific progress'. Rather than 'abstractly counterpose our conception to different tendencies and currents', the intelligent Marxist should aim for 'reciprocal understanding, won through a continuous debate'. In this, his political last will and testament, Togliatti was simply pursuing the implications of his 'polycentrism'.

The Yalta Memorandum became a major point of reference in the subsequent development of the via Italiana. Togliatti himself, possibly out of loyalty and sentiment, always paid ritual obeisance to the idea of a world communist movement (albeit diversified) with Moscow as its heart and soul. His successors, by comparison, saw no need to apply eulogistic epithets to the USSR. To their minds, world communism was a dead letter and there was little point in pretending otherwise. Leninist rhetoric became conspicious by its absence, as polycentrism was taken to its logical conclusion: open criticism of Soviet monism together with a forthright attachment to Western pluralism. The 'Italian road' furnished the model for what came to be known as Eurocommunism, itself merely a codification of established ideas and practices."

(Femia, Joseph V. Marxism and Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1993. pp. 104-105, 108-109.)

Post from a few months back I figured worth putting here.

Revisionism means to deprive Marxism of its revolutionary and scientific content. Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky were the two most infamous early revisionists, who came from the ranks of the labor aristocracy within the working-class movement. . .

Lenin and Stalin sharply denounced revisionism and yet continuously pointed out the distinction between it and creatively applying and developing Marxism. The latter leads to scientific analyses of phenomena, to revolution, to socialism and to communism. . . .

It is very easy to negate things under the cover of "opposing dogmatism," it is much more difficult to actually uphold revolutionary and scientific positions in times where their existence is demanded.

"The article [by James Burnham] is entitled 'Lenin's Heir', and it sets out to show that Stalin is the true and legitimate guardian of the Russian Revolution, which he has not in any sense 'betrayed' but has merely carried forward on lines that were implicit in it from the start. In itself, this is an easier opinion to swallow than the usual Trotskyist claim that Stalin is a mere crook who has perverted the Revolution to his own ends, and that things would somehow have been different if Lenin had lived or Trotsky had remained in power. Actually there is no strong reason for thinking that the main lines of development would have been very different. Well before 1923 the seeds of a totalitarian society were quite plainly there. Lenin, indeed, is one of those politicians who win an undeserved reputation by dying prematurely. Had he lived, it is probable that he would either have been thrown out, like Trotsky, or would have kept himself in power by methods as barbarous, or nearly as barbarous, as those of Stalin."
(Orwell, Sonia & Ian Angus (eds). George Orwell: In Front of Your Nose: 1945-1950. New Hampshire: David R. Godine. 2000. pp. 167-168.)

As an aside, Orwell seemed to be fond of Ante Ciliga and Victor Serge, the former a man who attacked Trotskyists as persons who wanted to be "better Stalinists than Stalin" and ended up a fascist, and the latter an anarchist who has also been accused of moving to the right by the time of his death.

"The causes of existing tensions are also to be sought in the erroneous foreign policy of Stalin and in the rigidity of Molotov, whose offensive and aggressive attitudes in postwar international affairs aroused a growing measure of suspicion and apprehension regarding the intentions of the Soviet Union. Stalin was wont to indulge in all sorts of threats and violence, and this had anything but the desired effect on the countries concerned... it would take too much space to cite all the negative features of Stalin's policies, which brought the Soviet Union into a state of isolation and led to the loss of the tremendous prestige which it had won through the sacrifice of millions of its sons in World War II."
(Tito, Josip Broz. Selected Speeches and Articles, 1941-1961. Zagreb: Naprijed. 1963. p. 199.)

"It is not our business today to analyse the elements that led to the positive internal changes in the Soviet Union, changes which are reflected in Soviet foreign policy as well, in particular in the policy which found endorsement in the Belgrade and Moscow Declarations, documents which should be a model for the principles of relations between socialist States, and, indeed, of international relations in general. This was discussed at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which had enormous significance for the re-establishment of confidence in the Soviet Union and her role in the world."
(Ibid. p. 234.)

George Novack (SWP member) praised the Chinese for their more revolutionary phraseology compared to the Soviets, but while doing so demonstrated the liberal and pro-revisionist line Trots took. "William F. Warde" was his pseudonym when writing for The Militant.

"2) Most reprehensible is the refusal of the Chinese to favor the de-Stalinization moves taken in the Soviet bloc since 1956. The continued cultivation of the Stalin cult and antagonism toward the liberalization of authoritarian rule places them at odds with the most progressive forces and anti-bureaucratic tendencies within the Soviet bloc and the Communist parties. This serves to counteract the support which revolutionary militants might otherwise be disposed to give to the Chinese criticisms of Moscow's line.

This reactionary attitude is symbolized on the state level in Peking's unprincipled bloc with Hoxha's Albania, one of the most despicable Stalinized regimes in Europe. In the factional fight against Khrushchev the Chinese may also be giving aid and comfort to the discredited Stalinist die-hards in the Soviet Union headed by the deposed Molotov 'anti-party' group.

Mao stands at the opposite pole in this respect to Castro who has not only supported the de-Stalinization processes in the Soviet bloc but has taken prompt and energetic steps to check any spread of the bureaucratic infection in Cuba.

3) While Peking praises Albania as a model Marxist-Leninist state, it unwarrantedly dismisses Yugoslavia as a capitalist state which should be ejected from the 'socialist camp.' Yet the internal regime of Communist Yugoslavia is much freer than the unmitigated despotism of its Albanian neighbor....

Since the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the quick withering of the 'hundred-flowers-bloom' experiment in 1957, the Mao regime has been very apprehensive of opposition and has maintained rigid control over all domains of social and political activity. Its refusal to abandon such Stalinist practices not only offends powerful progressive currents in the Soviet bloc but runs counter to its own conduct in the dispute with Moscow."
(Warde, William F. Moscow vs. Peking: The Meaning of the Great Debate. New York: Pioneer Publishers. 1963. pp. 10-11.)

The following words were witnessed by the author of this book.

"The Cuban Revolution was made not by any class, but rather by the youth. They began it, and the people joined in. The peasants were the first to join forces with the youth. The Revolution was made without class hatred, and it never appealed to class hatred...

The victory of the Revolution was not accidental. It was due to not making it into a class struggle, so that it got the support of 95 percent of the people at the end. There is no other case of such unanimity of opinion behind a regime as that behind the Cuban revolutionary regime....

Previous social revolutions were made by force and terror. The revolution was made by a minority, as in the French and Russian revolutions, and so the revolutionaries established the terror. However, this has not been the Cuban method, which is based on public opinion, because it is a revolution of the majority... The only hope of [the counter-revolutionaries] is to sell the idea that the revolutionary leaders are Communists and that the Communists have much influence....

The Cuban movement is no coup d'etat. It is a real revolution. It is summed up thus: In the world, there is a struggle of capitalism against Communism. One sacrifices freedom; the other sacrifices the needs of the people. The Cuban revolutionary idea is to preserve freedom and take care of the people's needs. They therefore call their movement 'humanist.' It will give the right to earn a living, the right not to die of hunger, All the classic rights of press, religion, and opinion are not useful if a man is hungry. But to meet material needs, it is not necessary to sacrifice freedom. They are doing all of this with the support of the majority, and without dictatorship."
(Talk by Fidel Castro in Princeton, New Jersey, April 20, 1959 in Alexander, Robert J. Presidents of Central America, Mexico, Cuba, and Hispaniola: Conversations and Correspondence. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers. 1995. pp. 173-175.)

"A matter which has raised considerable doubts in the minds of many protagonists of sex-equality in this country is the law, passed in 1936, making abortion illegal except in cases where it is justified by consideration for a woman's health or the danger of hereditary disease. This change in the law has been treated as an attack on sex-equality.

It is of the greatest importance in this connection, to refer back to the text of the original law which legalised abortion in Soviet Russia in 1921. It is important to note that in this law not a word was said about sex-equality, and the right to have an abortion was never put forward as a fundamental right of the Soviet woman. On the contrary, abortion was treated as a social evil, but an evil which was likely to be less harmful when practised legally than when carried out under conditions of secrecy. Here is part of the text of the original law permitting abortion:

'During the past decades the number of women resorting to artificial discontinuation of pregnancy has grown both in the West and in this country. The legislation of all countries combats this evil by punishing the woman who chooses to have an abortion and the doctor who performs it. Without leading to favourable results, this method of combating abortion has driven the operation underground and made the woman a victim of mercenary and often ignorant quacks who make a profession of secret operations. As a result, up to 50 per cent of such women are infected in the course of the operation, and up to 4 per cent of them die.

'The Workers' and Peasants' Government is conscious of this serious evil to the community. It combats this evil by propaganda against abortions among working women. By working for Socialism, and by introducing the protection of maternity and infancy on an extensive scale, it feels assured of achieving the gradual disappearance of this evil. But as moral survivals of the past and the difficult economic conditions of the present still compel many women to resort to this operation. . .' it is allowed in State hospitals.

The essential feature of this law is that it was based on 'difficult economic conditions,' and was of a temporary nature. The right to abortion was never introduced as one of the rights of Soviet women, to be enjoyed in all circumstances. It was considered an 'evil,' and was introduced as a makeshift to combat the serious mortality rate from illegal abortions carried out under unsatisfactory conditions. There is evidence that, at the present time, owing to the increased knowledge of contraceptives on the one hand and the growing sense of economic security on the other, women will not now practise abortion in this way, and that therefore the permissive law is no longer necessary in the interests of health. Abortion in Soviet legislation has always been regarded primarily as a question of health, not of equality. Since thousands of women have been neglecting the use of contraceptives because they could obtain an abortion, the legality of the less satisfactory method of discontinuing pregnancy has actually to some extent prevented more satisfactory methods from being used of avoiding pregnancy altogether."
(Sloan, Pat. Soviet Democracy. London: Victor Gollancz. 1937. pp. 125-126.)

On the Warsaw Uprising see: http://www.revleft.com/vb/do-stalini....html?t=158963

And this:

"In Lublin, then headquarters of the Polish Liberation Committee... I met General Boni Rola-Zimerski, head of the new Polish Army.

Rola-Zimerski gave a long detailed account of Red Army operations in which he had taken part, leading up to the capture of Praga, a suburb of Warsaw on the east bank of the wide Vistula River. He stated categorically that the Warsaw uprising, which was launched on the joint responsibility of the London Poles of the regime-in-exile, and General Bor, head of the underground Polish Home Army, was begun without prior consultation or liaison of any kind with the Red Army. He then explained that from what he, as leader of the Polish People's Army (a rival of the anti-Soviet Home Army), knew of Red Army plans, they had never included a frontal attack on Warsaw. He indicated that the Red Army would eventually take the Polish capital in an encirclement movement, and that the forces under General Bor, then fighting in Warsaw, were doomed to ultimate extermination by the Germans.

Later information, and real events, supported Rola-Zimerski's appraisal of the tragedy of Warsaw. The Germans had built up an extremely powerful defense system around the city; at one point as many as eighty separate lines of pillboxes and trenches were prepared. A near-crossing of the Vistula by the Russians, who had already paid a very heavy price to occupy Praga, could have been attempted only by a commander prodigal with the lives of his men; and even then that suicidal attempt might have failed. Wisely, the Red Army did not mount a further offensive till the following January, when the river had frozen hard and the marshes and swamps north and south of the capital gave a firm track for tanks and heavy-weapon carriers....

In Poland itself the prestige of the exiled government rapidly disintegrated after the Warsaw fiasco. Hundreds of Bor's former officers began to join the new Polish People's Army. In Lublin we met two of the earliest of these disillusioned patriots to come over. One of them, Colonel Tarnova, had been commander of all Bor's Home Army security troops. He reported that even before the uprising he and many of his 2,500 officers had openly disagreed with Bor's plans for two sound military reasons: 1) their means were insufficient to the task; and 2) they had no understanding with the Red Army. Tarnova had, in fact, resigned his command and fled from Warsaw with the intention of reaching liberated Poland, where he had intended to communicate with (then) Premier Mikolajczyk of the regime-in-exile, to request him to postpone the uprising until liaison could be established with the Allies. It was, however, already too late to interfere when he reached Lublin. Now he agreed completely when General Rola-Zimerski declared:

'We are deeply convinced that Bor's order was given purely for political reasons. . . . The plan of the Home Army all along has been to appear suddenly in cities being occupied by the Red Army and only at the last moment, in order to assume power. Their mistake was that they thought they could operate in Warsaw independent of the will of the Red Army.'"
(Snow, Edgar. The Pattern of Soviet Power. New York: Random House. 1945. pp. 53-56.)

This is a really great resource Ismail, thanks

"When the Soviet Union began its westward expansion, the ethnic minorities of Poland were friendlier to the Soviets than were the Balts - partly because the social tensions in eastern Poland were greater than in the Baltic region, partly because few members of these minorities associated themselves with the Polish state and regretted its demise, and partly because the cultural barriers between Ukrainians and Belorussians in eastern Poland and their counterparts in the Soviet Union were lower than those between Slavs and Balts. In eastern Poland, the Red Army 'was welcomed by smaller or larger but, in any case, visible, friendly crowds' that often erected triumphal arches to greet it. The existence of leftist sentiments in parts of eastern Poland helped the Soviets to establish their authority. Peasants set revolutionary committees on their own initiative...

As the Bolsheviks had done during the October Revolution, the Soviet government immediately launched radical agrarian reforms, giving land confiscated from landlords and the church to poor peasants and agricultural laborers...

Although, as some Baltic authors admit, 'local communists and other collaborationists enthusiastically welcomed the USSR occupation army,' most Balts were shocked when the Soviet Union invaded their countries in June 1940. For West Ukrainians and Belorussians, Soviet occupation simply meant a change of masters, whereas Balts lost their independence. However, a sizable part of the Russian and Jewish minorities welcomed the Soviets; large street demonstrations in support of the new government did occur in the Baltic region; a Red Guard militia was organized from below, and workers' committees elected at factories after the Soviet occupation addressed the problems accumulated by the former authoritarian regimes. As in western Ukraine and Belorussia, the Soviet government attempted to attract poor farmers and agricultural laborers, the majority of the rural community in Lithuania, and large minorities in Latvia and Estonia by launching a radical agrarian reform. However, those who received land could not collect crops before the Germans seized their lots and so did not become ardent Soviet supporters....

After the Soviet Union incorporated the western borderlands, the new authorities viewed all those who had been oppressed by previous governments as allies. They invited local Communists and other leftists, many of whom were Jewish, to take positions in the Soviet administration. Jan Gross observes that Jews 'lost the humiliating sense of being second-class citizens,' ... the Soviets granted borderland Jews real equality for the first time in modern history, and the Jews enjoyed much greater physical security."
(Statiev, Alexander. The Soviet Counterinsurgency in the Western Borderlands. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2010. pp. 39-41.)

Murray Bookchin, who was a Trot in the 30s-40s before becoming an Anarchist:

"All the liberals at the time [1930s] supported the Stalinists: not just The Daily Worker but The New York Times, which promoted Stalinist propaganda by Walter Duranty, its chief correspondent in Russia. In fact, besides Trotsky, the only people who seemed to oppose the Stalinists were the Hearst Press, and the reactionary right-wing press generally. Trotsky stood almost alone on the Left. . . .

I still believe he was a remarkable man, however much I may disagree with him today. . . Trotsky's ideas became increasingly democratic toward the end of his life, and his vision was more expansive than it had been in 1917 and throughout the 1920s."
(Bookchin, Murray. Anarchism, Marxism, and the Future of the Left: Interviews and Essays, 1993-1998. 1999. San Francisco, CA: AK Pess. pp. 44-46.)

Walter Duranty wasn't particularly liberal, not to mention that the head of the Dewey Commission was... a liberal. Still an amusing thing to quote though, since the Hearst Press was also sympathetic in its coverage of Hitler and helped disseminate the story that the Soviets were intentionally carrying out a famine to genocide Ukrainian Christians during collectivization.

Not to mention that plenty of liberals commented favorably on the USSR in Lenin's time, like Lincoln Steffens.

"When the Red Army crossed into eastern Poland, it was greeted with wild enthusiasm and mass demonstrations by the populace, largely made up of Ukrainians and Belorussians and Jews. A contemporary account saw it this way:

'Not a shot was fired, not a bomb was dropped, and villages and townspeople, free from the terror of German air attacks, hailed the Red Army as deliverers. Russian troops themselves contributed to this feeling of relief by saying they came as comrades. Many inhabitants in this part of Poland are Jews whose number has been swelled by thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing before the Germans. Their joy was great at finding themselves safe from Nazi hands.'

The Red Army stopped at the Bug River, which coincided with the Curzon line, and most Jews were sent to safety beyond the Urals. Among them was a young man by the name of Menachim Begun, later to become premier of Israel, and an inveterate enemy of all things socialist. Still, in his UN speech, December 10, 1945, Albert Einstein expressly noted that only the Soviet Union opened its borders to Jews in 1939 and saved tens of thousands from the Holocaust, almost at a time when a ship seeking safety in Cuba, under Batista, was turned back to Germany. In 1938 the Poland of the Colonels refused to repatriate thousands of Polish Jews from Germany, thus dooming most to death. Choose your morality: immoral to cross the Polish border or moral to save the lives of thousands of Jews?

Not only that but almost immediately, Moscow returned Vilnius, occupied by Pilsudski's Poland since 1920 (by agreement with the Big Powers and the Lithuanian Smetona government) to Lithuania. There is little gratitude in politics. Whether one reads this action by the Soviet government (under Stalin) as generous, as Georgi Dimitrov did, or as a Machiavellian move by the arch-villain Stalin, still the fact remains that Vilnius was returned by Soviet Russia to bourgeois Lithuania. The only condition the Soviets made—one which one imagines needed no special emphasis—was that the Lithuanians refrain from secret negotiations with Hitler—which is precisely what Smetona and his group continued to do, as they had been doing all along."

(Bonosky, Philip. Devils in Amber: The Baltics. New York: International Publishers. 1992. pp. 86-87.)

gonna post quote here in a few hours

From Dimitrov's diary, May 8, 1943:
"Went to see Molotov tonight, together with Manuil[sky]. We discussed the future of the Comintern. Reached the conclusion that the Comintern as a direct[ing] center for Com[munist] parties in the current conditions is an impediment to the Com[munist] parties' independent development and the accomplishment of their particular tasks. Work up a document dissolving that center."

May 11:
"Stal[in] said: Experience has shown that one cannot have an internat[ional] directing center for all countries. This became evident in Marx's lifetime, in Lenin's, and today. There should perhaps be a transition to regional associations, for example, of South America, of the United States and Canada, of certain Europ[ean] countries, and so on, but even this must not be rushed . . ."

May 21:
"—Politburo meeting in Stal[in]'s office. Along with members and candidate members of the PB, Manuilsky and I also attended.

Molotov reads out the ECCI presidium's resolution on dissolving the Comintern.

Kalin[in] remarks that our enemies will take advantage of this step. it would be better to make attempts to transfer the CI center to some other place—London, for instance! (Laughter.)

Stal[in] explains that experience has shown that in Marx's time, in Lenin's time, and now, it is impossible to direct the working-class movement of all countries from a single international center. Especially now, in wartime conditions, when Com[munist] parties in Germany, Italy, and other countries have the tasks of overthrowing their governments and carrying out defeatist tactics, while Com[munist] parties in the USSR, England, America and other [countries], on the contrary, have the task of supporting their governments to the fullest for the immediate destruction of the enemy. We overestimated our resources when we were forming the CI and believed that we would be able to direct the movement in all countries. That was our error. The further existence of the CI would discredit the idea of the International, which we do not desire.

There is one other reason for dissolving the CI, which is not mentioned in the resolution. That is the fact that the Com[munist] parties making up the CI are being falsely accused of supposedly being agents of a foreign state, and this is impeding their work in the broad masses. Dissolving the CI knocks this trump card out of the enemy’s hands. The step now being taken will undoubtedly strengthen the Com[munist] parties as nat[ional] working-class parties and will at the same time reinforce the internationalism of the popular masses, [an internationalism] whose base is the Soviet Union."
(Banac, Ivo (ed). The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov: 1933-1949. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2003. pp. 270-271, 275-276.)

Considering that Stalin already brought up dissolving the Comintern to Dimitrov in April 1941 (i.e. during the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, not when the USSR was trying to convince the West to work with the USSR against fascism), there is no evidence that it was done to appease the West.

From an otherwise hostile article (in an otherwise anti-communist journal):

"... the regime's economic policy as a whole does not discriminate against the minority areas and their economic development in favor of the Great Russians. Soviet industrialization was, of course, based on forced savings, which the government extracted for investment at the cost of popular consumption. But the minorities were not asked to bear a disproportionate share of the resulting hardships of a depressed living standard. The burden fell on all; in fact, it might be argued that the Great Russian majority initially made the greater sacrifice in order to permit the development of the capital-hungry, economically backward areas.

One economist has estimated, for example, that while the all-Union living standard fell markedly during the 1930's, in the four republics of Central Asia (not counting Kazakhstan), it may actually have improved to a slight degree. At the time the local economy was undergoing rapid change, as indicated by the fact that industrial output, which had been negligible, multiplied between six and nine times over between 1928 and 1937. Such an increase could only have been accomplished by the substantial investment of capital drawn from other parts of the country and by the application of new technology. Such help was even more important to the agriculture of the region.

In the initial stage of European colonial development, substantial capital was invested in the colonies, but often only in order to create a one-crop economy that in the long run was economically disadvantageous to the local people. There was an element of this approach in the Soviet regime's insistence on the expansion of cotton acreage in Central Asia, usually at the expense of existing wheat crops. But the area was not treated simply as a vast cotton plantation for the rest of the Soviet Union. On the contrary, existing resources of other kinds were widely developed. A hydro-electric power industry was developed, the output of which increased 8.5 times over in the period 1928-37. Earlier virtually all cotton had been shipped to Russia to be made into textiles, which in turn had to be shipped back, but in the 1930's a substantial textile industry was established in Tashkent. Leather shoe-making was established to utilize the hides from the region's extensive herds. These efforts make it evident that capital was retained in the area and not syphoned off for accumulation at the center. The data already cited on the growth of education and other cultural and social facilities similarly indicate that a goodly share of the returns accrued from exploitation of the region's natural wealth was reinvested in raising standards in the region.

Although the central Asian case may be one of the more outstanding examples, it reflects the general pattern of Soviet policy in the economic development of backward areas. The allocation of investment during the process of economic expansion has not in any significant degree been guided by considerations of nationality, but rather by those of economic efficiency or the defense needs of the country. And the benefits—as well as the burdens—which have resulted from economic development have been more or less equally shared by all peoples of the Soviet Union."
(Inkeles, Alex. "Nationalities in the USSR." Problems of Communism Vol. 9 No. 3 (May 1960). pp. 33-34.)

Considering Trot claims that Stalin supposedly was in total control of Rabkrin and used it for his own purposes... from a British parliamentary "Report (political and economic) of the Committee to collect information on Russia," American printing on July 12, 1921, page 40: "It also appears that Stalin has for some time ceased to take an intimate part in the work of the workers' and peasants' control, and that in addition to his other work as people's commissary for nationalities he has devoted a considerable amount of time to military work. In these circumstances Avanesov, the assistant people's commissary of the workers' and peasants' control, has virtually been in charge of the commissariat."

To quote from a review of Deutscher's bio of Stalin: "Deutscher makes a lot of play about Lenin's famous article 'Better Less But Better', written in February 1923, criticising the work of the Inspectorate. According to Deutscher, the article 'was a devastating attack on Stalin as the Commissar of the Inspectorate' (p. 251). Stalin stopped being Commissar of the Inspectorate in May 1922, when he was appointed General Secretary of the Party. At the time when Lenin wrote this article, Avanesov was in charge of the Inspectorate."

Also, for future reference, a Soviet attack on Stalin from 1968: click.

https://otheraspect.wordpress.com/20...ur-revolution/

An important Lenin quote which I'm posting here so I don't lose it.

"The right of nations to self-determination means only the right to independence in a political sense, the right to free, political secession from the oppressing nation. Concretely, this political, democratic demand implies complete freedom to carry on agitation in favour of secession, and freedom to settle the question of secession by means of a referendum of the nation that desires to secede. Consequently, this demand is by no means identical with the demand for secession, for partition, for the formation of small states. It is merely the logical expression of the struggle against national oppression in every form. The more closely the democratic system of state approximates to complete freedom of secession, the rarer and weaker will the striving for secession be in practice; for the advantages of large states, both from the point of view of economic progress and from the point of view of the interests of the masses, are beyond doubt, and these advantages increase with the growth of capitalism."