The Stalin Thread 2: all discussion about Stalin (as a person) in this thread please

You're just jealous because no one other than Hoxhaists admires Hoxha. :D

Stalin robbed banks because that was the decision taken by the party. Some of us, who believe in bourgeois morality or prefer to worship deities instead of upholding democratic centralism inside a communist party, will of course have problems with this.

Stalin stood by Lenin at crucial moments when Lenin was opposed by the likes of Trotsky. If Trotsky had his way, then the treaty of Brest Lithovsk would have never happened and the Russian Revolution would have succumbed to a German assault.

Source.
And so Broody has been disproved, once again proving himself to only talk shit.

You know trotsky was the one who signed and negotiated that treaty right? Where did you get that gem of misinformation from?

Lenin was at that meeting but he specifically was against that kind of thing. Your quote doesn't prove your point that Lenin approved of the trend of Bolshevik bank robbers.

Do us all a great big favor and stop name-dropping Getty as a source while simultaneously upholding a thesis Getty would have absolutely nothing to do with, namely the idea that the Purge trials were legitimate, and that Trotsky was working with Nazis to reinstate capitalism in the Soviet Union.

The only documents anybody has ever found relating to Trotsky's contacts inside the USSR after his exile prove one thing: that Trotsky was organizing in opposition to Stalin in ways that were consistent with his published political principles relating to revolutionary socialism. This is obviously not surprising, being that his oppositional activities to the Stalinist bureaucracy are what led to his exile in the first place. You have a hard-on for jumping from the existence of such opposition to the bizarre and quite frankly flat-earth conclusion that this opposition somehow proves the outlandish accusations leveled in the show trials.

Right here:


P.S.- Waiting for the claim that Stalin made Krupskaya write that at gunpoint.

You don't know how to argue. The bank robbery was a disaster, and lenin forbade anything like it after the notes they got couldn't even be spent. As much as you machismo "communists" think that sort of thing is cool, most people who are bystanders wouldn't. Also trotsky founded the red army do you have nothing to argue with that I'd take more seriously than what he would have to say.

Please could you use more punctuation and/or rephrase this?

I was unaware I said that Getty endorsed the conclusions of the Moscow Trials or anything else like that. Probably because I did not.

The importance of the evidence Getty uncovered is, as I noted, confined to the following:

1. Trotsky lied to the Dewey Commission about not having any contacts with oppositionists inside the USSR (which, of course, he had good reason to do so, but it just shows his words cannot be taken at face-value);
2. That the Moscow Trials were based on the fact that said opposition existed and that it obviously sought to overthrow the government.

The evidence for the most serious charges of the Moscow Trials, besides the confessions themselves, is discussed by Furr: http://clogic.eserver.org/2009/Furr.pdf

Nobody ever said that you claimed that Getty argued that Trotsky was an agent of fascism. The point I wanted to make is that you love to cite Getty making what are really mundane and unsurprising observations about Trotsky's behavior, then act as if that proves or makes some sort of compelling case for your argument, not Getty's, that Trotsky was wrecking the Soviet economy for Hitler. Even if what you say about Getty is technically accurate, the context in which you present him is misleading for the reason I stated above about citing him as if. It's the same tactic as Bush repeating 9-11 and Iraq in the same sentence over and over again to the point where people thought Saddam attacked the WTC towers. Technically, if you read the statements Bush made, he never actually says as much. But it's the way he made his technically accurate statements that were misleading. Similarly, people who read this thread who don't know any better might thing, "Gee, this Ismail guy is basing his claims about the legitimacy of the Stalinist show trials off the work of a serious historian. Maybe we should take this stuff seriously" -- without realizing, of course, that yours and Furr's crap is based on Getty's research about as closely as theories that JFK was shot by five gunmen are based off Isaac Newton's theory of gravity.

The rest of what you mention has been covered repeatedly time and again both on this forum and off. Trotsky hid his opposition activities from the Dewey Commission, a process that entailed lying, for reasons of revolutionary solidarity, to protect remaining opposition currents within the Soviet Union, in the same way that I would expect one of my comrades to lie about contact with me if they were making public pronouncements about socialist activity involving me that, if uncovered, could end up with me rotting in a labor camp. This proves absolutely nothing about the twilight-zone stalinoid version of events except for the fact that -- as I said in my last post -- Trotsky was engaging in opposition activity within the Soviet Union and then carried on that activity in exile.

Getty- a reputable historian who sticks to interpreting what is in evidence, not conjecturing "what-ifs" and spinning to force a preordained conclusion - has actually written about this bloc you keep pointing to as some nefarious thing. He has an article that touches upon it in volume 38, number 1 of the journal Soviet Studies. You know what he concludes about it? The same thing that Trotsky said: that it was a bloc with Zinovievists and other anti-Stalin elements within the bureaucracy that formed for the specific purpose of exchanging information, not on the basis of any shared political program, and CERTAINLY not on the basis of a secret fascist plot to wreck the Soviet economy, reinstate capitalism, and enslave Russian workers.

Once more, none of this suggests anything apart from what everybody already knows about Trotsky: that he was working to generate political opposition to Stalin in the Soviet Union, and one of the ways he was doing this was by cultivating contacts in order to gather information about the political mood of the people at large, and segments of the bureaucracy in particular.

The rest of the story you and Grover Furr like to talk about can be found only in the darkest recesses of the rabbit-hole Alice fell down. I invite comrades to read the Cultural Logic article of Furr's you keep posting. Pay attention to how Furr structures his "argument," what evidence he presents, and how that evidence does (or more accurately, does not) prove the specific claims he makes about the political character of Trotsky's oppositional activities.

I actually didn't cite Getty's observations about Trotsky's behavior, I cited the fact that he found evidence from Trotsky's archives that he sent letters to Radek (which Radek had mentioned in the Trials) and that he was organizing a left-right bloc in the USSR in the early 30's (also mentioned during the Trials.) Getty is a bourgeois historian, so obviously one is able to have a different interpretation of materials than he does.

So in other words, what I said: "he had good reason to [lie], but it just shows his words cannot be taken at face-value."

Wow, that's the exact same article I read years ago and is the basis of my claims of Getty researching into Trotsky's archives! It's also an article which I posted on RevLeft not long after: http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.p...11&postcount=7

He also mentions it in his books Origins of the Great Purges and The Road to Terror, both of which I have.

It may have been formed initially or mainly "for the purposes of communication and exchange of information," but that ignores any possibility of subsequent activities. Getty also notes that of letters to Radek, Sokolnikov, Preobrazhensky and others, "Unlike virtually all Trotsky's other letters (including even the most sensitive) no copies of these remain the Trotsky Papers. It seems likely that they have been removed from the Papers at some time. Only the certified mail receipts remain. At his 1937 trial, Karl Radek testified that he had received a letter from Trotsky containing 'terrorist instructions', but we do not know whether this was the letter in question."

I hope comrades pay attention to how you frame this. You claim that the bloc "may have been formed initially or mainly for the purposes of communication" but that leaving it at that "ignores any possibility of subsequent activities." Um, no. Actually Getty's argument -- the one you cite repeatedly to try to give yourself some credibility -- doesn't "ignore" any possibilities. It simply doesn't record them because there is no evidence to support them. There is no evidence to support the idea that the bloc was working with Nazis, just as there is no evidence to support the idea that they were in contact with Nostradamus or hitching rides on UFOs, so we "don't know" whether the "terrorist activities" letter Radek was tortured into talking about also contained instructions related to UFOs and Nostradamus. But just maybe they did!!!

You, on the other hand, work backward from the position that the show-trial accusations must have been true and then twist evidence and the lack of evidence to fit that conclusion. So if there's no documentary evidence to show that Trotsky was working with Hitler, and instructing people to wreck the Soviet economy and engage in Blanquist-style assassination attempts? Well, then that must have been the result of Trotsky destroying the letters. No evidence in the papers that survived in Nazi archives? Well, then the relevant documents have been destroyed either deliberately or inadvertently. I hope every comrade who is serious about his politics pays attention to this methodology: even the lack of evidence of Trotsky's supposed guilt is evidence of his guilt. It's the same with every person who subscribes to kook conspiracy theories. You, like your predecessors behind the Moscow trials, adopt a methodology designed to reach the conclusion you already want for ulterior reasons.

Serious historians, like Getty, do not work this way, so please stop citing the evidence that they find, and twisting it to reach conclusions that do not in any way flow from their evidence.

Not in the scope of Getty's article, anyway. The proof independent of the Trials that Trotsky was trying to organize an opposition including Radek, Zinoviev and others is important enough, considering that in public he was calling them "capitulators" and whatnot (which Trots always liked to use as "evidence" against the Trials.)

Pretty sure no one was testifying about UFOs or Nostradamus, but thanks anyway.

It was Getty himself who noted that the archives had been tampered with. Considering that you have a letter by Trotsky begging his wife for cunnilingus and a letter sent to Radek on oppositional activities in the USSR, it is notable than highly personal letters like the former are there, whereas the latter, mentioned in the Trials and in pre-Trial testimony, are not.

In other words, Marxists should not take advantage of bourgeois historiography when possible, a particularly ridiculous thing to say.

So there is evidence that this bloc engaged in anything besides exchange of information? Where is this evidence? I am skeptical it could possibly exist, in light of how Getty notes in the article that members of the bloc were arrested (for unrelated reasons) before it even had a chance to get off the ground.

Where did I say people were testifying about it? I was saying that if you want to start making suggestions about what "could" have happened, but there is no evidence for, why stop at Trotsky forming a secret fascist-wrecking bloc? Why not start suggesting UFOs and Nostradamus and healing crystals and Nazi zombies? Hmmmm?

Where does Getty say that Trotsky's archive was "tampered" with? He says that the archive is incomplete insofar as it does not contain a copy of a letter that there is proof Trotsky wrote and sent. There's a difference between the two. Who knows why this letter or that document is missing? Do you have evidence that it was deliberately tampered with? Maybe it was tempered with by Santa Claus? Lucifer perhaps? There is as much evidence for this as there is that somebody "tampered with" Trotsky's archive for the purpose of cleansing it of any evidence of his affiliation with fascists.

Um, no. You're the one who keeps harping about Getty being a "bourgeois historian." I am the one who is saying that Getty actually upholds a sound historical methodology, and that it's misleading for you to try to appropriate his well-earned reputation as a skilled historian to ride your whack-job hobby horse.

Why do people care so much about Stalin?

The evidence is contained in the Moscow Trials and in the voluminous pre-Trial testimony, which, of course, you explain away. Furr discusses such evidence, as well as corroborative evidence, in his article I've linked above.

Well lets see, Trotsky had a vested interest in making sure any materials on organizing opposition inside the USSR remained secret. I don't think he had any interest whatsoever in Nostradamus, healing crystals, or zombies.

"Unlike virtually all Trotsky's other letters (including even the most sensitive) no copies of these remain the Trotsky Papers. It seems likely that they have been removed from the Papers at some time."

Which, of course, is entirely convenient.

Are you claiming he is not?

Because he defended Marxism-Leninism. That is precisely why Khrushchev, Tito, Mao, and all other revisionists attacked him, whether claiming he "violated Leninist norms" as the Soviet revisionists did, or that he was supposedly "dogmatic" as the Maoists do, etc. As Hoxha noted, attacks on Stalin were in reality attacks on Marxism-Leninism, on the proletarian revolution and communism.

"I, however, admit that I am guilty of the dastardly plan of the dismemberment of the U.S.S.R., for Trotsky was negotiating about territorial concessions, and I was in a bloc with the Trotskyites. This is a fact, and I admit it." - Bukharin

"In the second half of 1932 we relized that our banking on a growth of difficulties in the country had failed. We began to realize that the Party and its Central Committee would overcome these difficulties. But both in the first and in the second half of 1932 we were filled with hatred towards the Central Committee of the Party and towards Stalin ... We were convinced that the leadership must be superseded at all costs, that it must be superseded by us, along with Trotsky." - Zinoviev

"Knowing that we might be dicovered, we designated a small group to continue our terroristic activities. For this purpose we designated Sokolnikov. It seemed to us that on the side of the Trotskyites this role could be successfully performed by Serebryakov and Radek. Asked about this, Mrachkovsky said: Yes, in our opinion Serebryakov and Radek could act as substitutes if, contrary to our expectations, our leading group should be discovered." - Kamenev

Right. We've been over this before. There's an international conspiracy involving hundreds of people scattered across three continents plotting with the governments of multiple countries to wreck the Soviet economy and reinstate capitalism, yet even 80 years later, the only "evidence" that has ever surfaced of these specific charges is the "testimony" produced after what even Grover Furr acknowledges to have been torture -- "testimony" that is inconsistent with what we know to be facts about the whereabouts of specific businesses, individuals, etc.

Nobody disputes that Trotsky had a vested interest in covering up opposition activities which could endanger the lives of comrades with whom he had worked. Where there's disagreement is that the nature of this opposition revolved around "terrorist acts," "wrecking," and collaboration with fascists -- charges for which there is exactly as much evidence as the claim that UFOs attempted to abduct Stalin on the eve of the Moscow Trials.

Are you having issues? This is the second time you've asked a question about Getty that makes literally no sense in the context of the comments of mine you're responding to. Yes, Getty is a bourgeois historian, but NO, that does NOT mean we disregard everything he says. What is puzzling about this is that YOU were the person who brought up that Getty is a bourgeois historian, as if to question whether we should accept what he says. Now you're asking a question as if I am the one trying rubbish his work.

Hilarious. You are the person who less than a month of ago, after it was brought to his attention that Marx defined socialism as a classless society without a proletariat or "dictatorship of the proletariat," was trying to argue that Marxism is not a cold, dead dogma and that therefore we should be open to separating Marxist theory from what Marx himself said. Now when that idea is inconvenient, you are trying to argue that attacking a specific personality is attacking an entire body of thought.

Another classic example of Stalinist "principles." There's not one position or statement today that you won't find yourself on the opposite side of tomorrow when the politics of that opposing position suit your better. And the "facts" you base your new analysis on? Well, you'll just make those up or torture them out of people. There is no consistent methodology or framework you use to arrive at your political conclusions apart from the simple question of whether it supports the Great Leader Enver Hoxha and those whom he has pronounced his Holy predecessors. It is the sickness of nationalism, embodied in the symbol of Hoxha, and which is the essence of Marxism-Leninism.