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

I've been looking for an opportunity to give the endless Stalin-discussions a sticky of their own for a while now. The OP is such a great post that I think I finally found it. From now on, let's keep all discussions that primarily concern Mr Stalin (as a person) in this thread. Such threads posted on the forum will be merged here.

And everyone, regardless our opinion in this issue, let's follow the advice of the OP: let's keep the discussion civil, and based on material facts that can be backed up by evidence. -- Sentinel


I thought there wasn't enough threads on this forum about Stalin's crimes, so I want to make another one. I want this one to be different from all the other ones though. Everyone's free to have their opinions about Stalin, but we have to admit that his alleged crimes either did or did not happen, as a matter of historical fact.

In this thread, I invite anyone with a criticism of Stalin to present their accusation only if they can provide what they consider is evidence for it, in the form only of fully referenced quotations from published sources. If the source is available online then a link would be helpful, so the rest of the source can be perused by anyone interested. Using the sources of course, anyone is free to make a reasoned argument to back up their condemnation or Stalin, but please no emotional vitriole. Then another poster can make known their objections. The sources and their authors of course are fully open to discussion as well obviously, but, please, only in the same fashion as above. Maybe after reading some of the posts some comrades will change their opinion of Stalin and regard him as a murderer and tyrant. Maybe some comrades will change their view on him and see him as a great communist. But no need for inter-poster attacks and insults.

Just one more thing, rather than linking to sources, please actually post the essential extracts, concisely as possible. You know, for readability.

So does any comrade care to start?

This thread has exceeded 500 posts and is being restarted.

how long was his slong

I'm sure kleber has a seperate hard drive filled with crap about Stalin. inb4 getty quotation and huge tendency war where the same outcome is me raging about some bullshit, and hoping that i'm being trolled. On a seperate note, answering above poster's question, my guesstimate is his penis is 7 inches. his balls are the size of grapefruits however, he needed them.

Why did Stalin support Kerensky's provisional government?

"On March 12 [1917], the day of his return to Petrograd, the bureau considered the question of Stalin's admission to its membership.... Three days after his return he was elected to the bureau's Presidium with full voting rights and was appointed Bolshevik representative on the Executive Committee (Excom) of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' Deputies. With Kamenev he also took over Pravda... Stalin dominated the party during the three weeks until Lenin's return. Recognizing that Lenin's violent opposition to the war and to the provisional government would antagonize most party members and people outside the party, he pursued a moderate policy. He advocated limited support for the provisional government on the grounds that the bourgeois-democratic revolution was not yet complete and that there would be a period of years before conditions were ripe for the socialist revolution. It made no sense, therefore, to work to destroy the government at this stage.

In his policy towards the war he was equally common-sensed, writing that 'when an army faces the enemy, it would be the most stupid policy to urge it to lay down arms and go home.' In response to the general demand among Social Democrats, he was even prepared to consider reunion with acceptable elements in the Menshevik party, and on his initiative the bureau agreed to convene a joint conference.

Pravda reflected this policy of moderation. Articles received from Lenin were edited, and the abusive references to the provisional government and to the Mensheviks were toned down or cut. According to Shlyapnikov, jaundiced by his summary displacement, the 'editorial revolution was strongly criticized by Petrograd workers, some even demanding the expulsion of Stalin, Kamenev and Muranov from the party.'"
(Grey, Ian. Stalin: Man of History. 1st ed. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1979., pp. 89-90.)

Stalin later admitted he was wrong, saying in 1924 the following:

Why isn't there a Stalin Sub-Board?

It'd probably be about as productive as Kosovo being an autonomous republic under Serbia was.

Good ole Stalin:

purged about the entire original Politburo
re-instated puritan morale codex
kinda crapped up soviet modern art (see El Lissitsky, in the 20s Moscow was something of an emergent art capitol, similar to New York or Paris, which would've surely been a good propaganda argument)
let an awesome lot of dudes die in WWII.
liked musicals

But then again, Trotsky could have done worse. Dude didn't understand that Stalin wasn't actually arguing. Didn't purge him and his crew when the time was right. Oh well.

Seriously?

What do you mean "seriously"? All of those critiques of Stalin are based on facts I believe to be true. These are not the only critiques. He made a mighty fine emperor, though. Secured the continuation of the Soviet experiment.

But when we look at Trotsky, one gets a feeling that in an alt-history where he got to rule the State, he might have crapped the game up for the whole Union. Precisely the thing old Lenin said about him in his Testament. He was too confident in his own awesomeness.

Thou must not accuse the great leader Stalin. Repeat x 100.:rolleyes:

Having said that, it is true that Stalin purged a majority of the original Bolsheviks, did re-instate a conservative social society (abortion, homosexuality), Socialist Realism did hold back the culture scene and his failings in WW2 are well known.

I won't hold it against him that he liked musicals, though.:laugh:

That Stalin "made a fine Emperor" is not a Marxist analysis, nor are claims that he "crapped up" arts.

Stalin did many mistakes as dictator . he murdered many soviets , he also had death camps for them. I am not sure, but i think that because of Stalin's arrogance now exist many neo-nazis in ex-USSR countries , cause every time i spoke to the neo nazi from Russia,Ukraine , Poland etc. ,when i ask them why they hate commies , antifascists the main theme is Stalin .

One thing's for certain - the Holdomor did not happen. That is fascist propaganda.

Yes, claims that Stalin intentionally starved Ukrainians to "genocide" them (or intentionally starved them to begin with) are pretty much debunked outside of conservative circles. ComradeOm (who hates "Stalinists") had good posts on the subject, but any decent overview of the situation will show you that the "Holodomor" is fictitious. I don't think anyone on RevLeft believes in the "Holodomor," though.

Well Ukrainian nationalists and Poles basically just shout "EVIL RUSSIANS" over and over. The year 1939 for Poles represents a dark period in which the glorious Polish nation was enslaved by the evil Communist menace and the sacred, God-given independence of Poland was trampled by the monstrous mongrel Russians or whatever.

How did it do that?

Aside from the purges and morality in the USSR circa Stalin the rest just seems like a bunch of inane bro babble "dude."

Self-flagellation, repeat x200.

Elaborate.

This could be arguable and did make mistakes in terms of military strategy and tactics but to say he just "let a bunch of awesome 'dudes' die," during WWII seems absurd.

It prevented wonderfully moving works of art like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wcMmI0tKkQ

But seriously, the only real criticism I've seen of Socialist Realism is that it "stifled" non-Socialist Realist art (obviously) and that too much emphasis was placed on painting leaders and such, which isn't really an indictment of Socialist Realism as it is painters being required (or consciously deciding) to paint leaders to score brownie points.

I would like to further this point by citing the article Literature and Art Should Serve to Temper People with Class Consciousness for the Construction of Socialism by Enver Hoxha.

Sorry mates. My overall view of Stalin is actually positive. My main man Žižek is a self-proclaimed Stalinist, who am I to argue. Still,he did some questionable things. Like all that constant history-modifying, how's a worker supposed to make the right conclusions from history if the history itself is unreliable?

Zizek has said the USSR under Stalin was worse than Fascist Germany under Hitler

Zizek says a lot of things, doesn't he?

Žižek is a hack who no one should like and who demeans Marxism by associating it with his lameness. The most recent thing he's done was viciously denounce the London rioters as "animals" or some such.

At best his works can be described as philosophical junk food.

Can you not see the link between Socialist Realism being the approved artistic framework and the need to score brownie points?

And yeah, it stifled non-Socialist Realist art, which is more than a shame because culture is about more than politics, the party or any other manner of sectarianism. Some of the greatest musical, artistic, cultural and literary works have come from sources/events that have nothing to do with politics, Socialism etc. That is the tragedy of the artistic scene in the USSR, manifesting itself in Socialist Realist orthodoxy.

Such dross!

Go and tell Chopin, or Beethoven, or Liszt, that they can't conceive great things in their heads and that they must work like engineers.:rolleyes:

What great art did Enver Hoxha ever conceive of? Who is he to lecture anybody on the subject?

Zizek uses this as a publicity stunt, people who openly support Stalin almost never refer to themselves as Stalinist, while Zizek, in his very confuse and obscure writing style, says that:

From: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n06/slavoj-...talitarianisms

His method of ''marxist psychoanalisis'' can hardly be called Marxist, instead of focusing on the material conditions, he throwns jargon at ideological manifestations and while not being that bad on movies, it is pretty inefficient on historical events, like in the text I qouted, which he uses the tired liberal paradigm of totalitarism.

A fact also worth noting is that, despite being a self-declared communist, he takes no part in any real political movement or organisation whatsoever.

Where did he say to do this? What gives you this impression? Did you even read the essay?

Art isn't some mindless exercise, it's not painting some still lifes or learning chords on the piano as some souless bourgeois exercises, it is mean't to raise the consciousness, to make a statement; to have a purpose. Within the context of a Socialist society particularly during those times art's purpose is clear. It should be a reflection of consciousness.

In all actuality he was a very well read man, perhaps not an artist himself (that I know of anyway) but I don't see the relevancy of this question, really.

Do you even understand what art is? 'Learning chords on the piano as some soulless bourgeois exercises'. In what sense is that bourgeois? It is precisely what art is, and art is where culture comes from.

You cannot force a population over a period of time to pre-dispose itself to a new conception of artistic culture. Sorry to say it, but some of the greatest art in the world has come from painting still faces and 'learning chords on the piano'. That you demean the art of musicality to such a sorry, simplistic phrase indicates to me that you do not understand what you are talking about.

Only on Revleft could you have so many threads contributed to fighting about the class nature of the Soviet Union, Stalin v.s. Trotsky, the Ukrainian famine, etc.

I tend to agree with Mao's criticism of Stalin, mainly around how collectivization was carried out, the emphasis he placed on heavy industry, the lack of party and socialist democracy, the move towards conservatism in terms of familial relations, wage differentials, and religion, how he liked racist and genocidal American cowboy movies (I'm being serious), and how policing and terror was used. I've never understood why so many on this site were quick to defend a legacy that was so often based on bullying the people at the barrel of a gun.

Governing expression is wrong on a moral level. At the same time, would you agree that art and culture can be used as a weapon in our ideological struggle to transform society? If yes, then isn't there a way to have an open environment for all artists (even if their form and content are reactionary) while still promoting a radical rupture with former policies and habits? Just another way to look at it.

Stalin apparently hated John Wayne, so he wasn't that big a fan of reactionary Westerns.

Anyway, your words for an "open environment for all artists" are reminiscent of the "Hundred Flowers Campaign." It's also part of the "two-line" analysis the Maoists always use to justify the existence of reactionaries within the Party. As Hoxha wrote in Imperialism and the Revolution, "The party is not an arena of classes and the struggle between antagonistic classes, it is not a gathering of people with contradictory aims. The genuine Marxist-Leninist party is the party of the working class only and bases itself on the interests of this class." (p. 400.) Hoxha then quoted Stalin who noted that the "Communist Party is the monolithic party of the proletariat, and not the party of a bloc of heterogeneous class elements." (Stalin, Works Vol. VIII, p. 34.) The CCP under "New Democracy" and the "Hundred Flowers Campaign" rejected this policy.

Hoxha continues: "According to Mao Tsetung, in socialist society, side by side with the proletarian ideology, materialism and atheism, the existence of bourgeois ideology, idealism and religion, the growth of 'poisonous weeds' along with 'fragrant flowers', etc., must be permitted. Such a course is alleged to be necessary for the development of Marxism, in order to open the way to debate and freedom of thought, while in reality, through this course, he is trying to lay the theoretical basis for the policy of collaboration with the bourgeoisie and coexistence with its ideology... Mao Tsetung draws the conclusion that idealism, metaphysics and the bourgeois ideology will exist eternally, therefore not only must they not be prohibited, but they must be given the possibility to blossom, to come out in the open and contend. This conciliatory stand towards everything reactionary goes so far as to call disturbances in socialist society inevitable and the prohibition of enemy activity mistaken... today there really are 100 schools contending. This has enabled the bourgeois wasps to circulate freely in the garden of 100 flowers and release their venom." (op. cit. pp. 410-412.)

In his diary Hoxha noted comments from Roger Garaudy (a pro-Soviet French "communist" who later became a Holocaust denialist) in the following way: "The day before yesterday I read an article in the French newspaper Le Monde, a correspondent of which deals with certain views of the French revisionist Garaudy, who amongst other things, expresses the same views as the Chinese about the development of art and culture, without using the expression 'a hundred flowers and a hundred schools'. The author of this article, voicing the ideas of Garaudy, says that the arts, culture and philosophy must be allowed to develop freely, according to the opinions and beliefs of all... Ideologically, the Chinese are united with and in the same positions as all the revisionist currents in the world, to which they will add the specific characteristics of Chinese revisionism, which will emerge because of the terrain of Chinese society itself, the aspirations of the revisionist clique, and the old Chinese philosophy. In other words, Chinese revisionism will be a very complicated, mystical and cunning grafting, because the Chinese will steadily advance in the defence of their eclectic revisionist theories." (Reflections on China Vol. II, pp. 660-661.)

There is a reason petty-bourgeois intellectuals were infatuated with Maoism in the 60's and 70's.

Maybe the "Holodomor" as construted by Ukrainian nationalist did not occur in their words, but something did happen. There was a famine and many people died.

I don't think anyone denies that there was a famine due to a variety of factors, with Stalin wanting to genocide the Ukrainians not being among them.

It's not that governing expression is wrong on a moral level that concerns me (though that is a valid criticism). The point is that art and culture are something that develop organically. You (especially if the 'you' is the "monolithic Marxist-Leninist Party"!) cannot force art, culture, music etc. towards a working class perspective. Firstly, especially not from the monolithic M-L party. That is but one tendency in but one political philosophy. Secondly, you will end up constraining or even excluding whole careers. Shostakovitch was somebody who was massively constrained by the Socialist Realist directive in the USSR, for example. A great shame.

There are things that can be done to bring the art and culture sector in line with Socialism, mainly related to how artists are paid, copyrighting, royalties and so on. But you cannot, cannot, have non-artists directing the greatest geniuses of the day on how to go about making their art, according to some half-baked, third rate philosophical idea about what they believe art and culture should be. That is absolutely key. Unless your idea of art is some bullcrap like 'Tempering The Steel'.

Hoxha is wrong. And even if he was right, why should we be reading him like his word are parables?

Really, if revolutionaries are so afraid of conservative and anticommunist speech then how should they expect to make revolution in the first place? I can get suppressing the speech of hated and notorious reactionaries after the establishment of a new radical order, but why make routine arrests of those "poisonous" weeds that make complaints that might be legitimate? There will be contradictions and roadblocks in socialist society, and there is no way a revolutionary party has a monopoly on what the true resolution of those obstacles would be.

There was, indeed, a differentiation made between the fragrant flowers and poison weeds before the Hundred Flowers campaign started.

And he did stop the campaign, only after renegade antisocialist elements like the Hungarian Petofi Club were planning armed attacks on party officials. Government and party offices were burnt. Kidnappings happened here and there. But it was a success— it exposed hardcore rightists (the real bad weeds) and brought millions more who at first had reactionary habits and tendencies (or, those with the potential of being flagrant flowers) to the right side of socialism. He rightly knew that while enemies of the revolution in the party and the streets were there and had to go, there was also a non-antagonistic relationship between the masses and the party that had to be dealt with through non-coercive means. That was the genius of it all.

Actually that speech was revised from the original. See: http://ml-review.ca/aml/China/historyofmaopt2.html

In addition: http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv6n1/bico.htm

It notes that "the document was generally welcomed by the Khrushchevites, and seen as support for their position in 1957."

They aren't "afraid." Reactionaries who express anti-communist views do not have "complaints that might be legitimate." Genuine criticism (and self-criticism) exists under the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The Party is the leading force of state and society; it is the vanguard of the proletariat. Because it analyzes things scientifically and because control of both the means of production and of society itself are under the control of the proletarian dictatorship, it is capable of overcoming contradictions through class struggle and/or being able to pinpoint the source of those contradictions through various means, and to overcome them either through coordinated work or, if the subject is economic in origin, through adjustments in planning. Of course undervaluing the vanguard in favor of the "great helmsman" is something natural for Maoists.

This is a very important question and perhaps the most misunderstood one....I would like to here give notes from what i read about Stalin from American Cultural Historian Bruce Franklin.....I hope they prove to be useful.....

Introduction to THE ESSENTIAL STALIN

The Essential STALIN

[FONT=Arial]Introduction to book Major Theoretical writings 1905-52 By Bruce Franklin[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]
[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]I used to think of Joseph Stalin as a tyrant and butcher who jailed and killed millions, betrayed the Russian revolution, sold out liberation struggles around the world, and ended up a solitary madman, hated and feared by the people of the Soviet Union and the world. Even today I have trouble saying the name "Stalin" without feeling a bit sinister.
[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]But, to about a billion people today, Stalin is the opposite of what we in the capitalist world have been programmed to believe. The people of China, Vietnam, Korea, and Albania consider Stalin one of the great heroes of modern history, a man who personally helped win their liberation.
[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]This belief could be dismissed as the product of an equally effective brainwashing from the other side, except that the workers and peasants of the Soviet Union, who knew Stalin best, share this view. For almost two decades the Soviet rulers have systematically attempted to make the Soviet people accept the capitalist world's view of Stalin, or at least to forget him. They expunged him from the history books, wiped out his memorials, and even removed his body from his tomb.
[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]Yet, according to all accounts, the great majority of the Soviet people still revere the memory of Stalin, and bit by bit they have forced concessions. First it was granted that Stalin had been a great military leader and the main antifascist strategist of World War II. Then it was conceded that he had made important contributions to the material progress of the Soviet people. Now a recent Soviet film shows Stalin, several years before his death, as a calm, rational, wise leader.[/FONT]
But the rulers of the Soviet Union still try to keep the people actually from reading Stalin. When they took over, one of their first acts was to ban his writings. They stopped the publication of his collected works, of which thirteen volumes had already appeared, covering the period only through 1934. This has made it difficult throughout the world to obtain Stalin's writings in the last two decades of his life. Recently the Hoover Institute of Stanford University, whose purpose, as stated by its founder, Herbert Hoover, is to demonstrate the evils of the doctrines of Karl Marx" completed the final volumes in Russian so that they would be available to Stanford's team of émigré anti-Communists (In. preparing. this volume, I was able to use the Hoover collection of writings by and about Stalin only by risking jail, directly Violating my banishment by court injunction from this Citadel of the Free World.)
[FONT=Arial]The situation in the U.S. is not much different from that in th7 U.S.S.R. In fact the present volume represents the first time since 1955 that a major publishing house in either country has authorized the publication of Stalin's works. U.S. Capitalist publishers have printed only Stalin's wartime diplomatic correspondence and occasional essays, usually much abridged, in anthologies. Meanwhile his enemies and critics are widely published. Since the early 1920s there have been basically two opposing lines claiming to represent Marxism-Leninism, one being Stalin's and the other Trotsky’s. The works of Trotsky are readily available in many inexpensive editions. And hostile memoirs, such as those of Khrushchev and Svetlana Stalin, are actually serialized in popular magazines.
[/FONT]
The suppression of Stalin's writings spreads the notion that he did not write anything worth reading. Yet Stalin is clearly one of the three most important historical figures of our century, his thought and deeds still affecting our daily lives, considered by hundreds of millions today as one of the leading political theorists of any time, his very name a strongly emotional household word throughout the world. Anyone familiar with the development of Marxist-Leninist theory in the past half century knows that Stalin was not merely a man of action. Mao names him "the greatest genius of our time," calls himself Stalin's disciple, and argues that Stalin' s theoretical works are still the core of world Communist revolutionary strategy.

[FONT=Arial]Any historical figure must be evaluated from the interests of one class or another. Take J. Edgar Hoover, for example. Anti-Communists may disagree about his performance, but they start from the assumption that the better he did his job of preserving "law and order" as defined by our present rulers the better he was. We Communists, on the other hand, certainly would not think Hoover "better" if he had been more efficient in running the secret police and protecting capitalism. And so the opposite with Stalin, whose job was not to preserve capitalism but to destroy it, not to suppress communism but to advance it. The better he did his job, the worse he is likely to seem to all those who profit from this economic system and the more he will be appreciated by the victims of that system. The Stalin question is quite different for those who share his goals and for those, who oppose them. For the revolutionary people of the world it is literally a life and-death matter to have a scientific estimate of Stalin, because he was, after all, the principal leader of the world revolution for thirty crucial years.
[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]I myself have seen Stalin from both sides. Deeply embedded in my consciousness and feelings was that Vision of Stalin as tyrant and butcher. This was part of my over-all view of communism as a slave system, an idea that I was taught in capitalist society. Communist society was not red but a dull-gray world. It was ruled by a secret clique of powerful men. Everybody else worked for these few and kept their mouths shut. Propaganda poured from all the media. The secret police were everywhere, tapping phones, following people on the street, making midnight raids.

Anyone who spoke out would lose his job, get thrown in jail, or even get shot by the police. One of the main aims of the government was international aggression, starting wars to conquer other counties. When I began to discover that this entire vision point by point described my own society a number of questions arose in my mind.
[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]For me, as for millions of others in the United States it was the Vietnamese who forced a change in perception. How could we fail to admire the Vietnamese people and to see Ho Chi Minh as one of the great heroes of our times? What stood out not about Ho was his vast love for the people and his dedication to serving them. (In 1965, before I became a Communist, I spoke at a rally soliciting blood for the Vietnamese victims of U.S. bombing. When I naively said that Ho was a nationalist above being a Communist and a human being above being a nationalist, I was pelted with garbage and, much to my surprise, called a "dirty Commie. But we were supposed to believe that Ho was a "tyrant and butcher." Later, it dawned on me that Fidel Castro was also supposed to be a "tyrant and butcher" although earlier we had been portrayed as a freedom fighter against the Batista dictatorship. Still later, I began to study the Chinese revolution, and found in Mao's theory and preaches the guide for my own thinking and action. But, again, we were Supposed to see Mao as a "tyrant and butcher" and also a "madman” the more I looked into it, the more I found that these "tyrants and butchers"-Ho, Fidel, and Mao -were all depicted servants of the people, inspired by a deep and self sacrificing love for them. At some point, I began to wonder if perhaps even Stalin was not a "tyrant and butcher."[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]With this thought came intense feelings that must resemble - what someone in a tribe experiences when violating a taboo. But if we want to understand the world we live in, we must face Stalin.
[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]Joseph Stalin personifies a major aspect of three decades of twentieth-century history. If we seek answers to any of the crucial questions about the course of our century, at some point we find Stalin standing directly in our path. Is it possible for poor and working people to make a revolution and then wield political power? Can an undeveloped, backward nation whose people are illiterate, impoverished, diseased, starving, and lacking in all the skills and tools needed to develop their productive forces possibly achieve both material and cultural well-being? Can this be done under a condition of encirclement by hostile powers, greedy for conquest, far more advanced industrially and, militantly: and fanatical in their opposition to any people s revolutionary government? What price must be paid for the success of revolutionary development? Can national unity be achieved in a vast land inhabited by many peoples of diverse races, religions, culture, language, and levels of economic development?
[/FONT]
Is it possible to attain international unity among the exploited and oppressed peoples of many different nations whose governments depend upon intense nationalism and the constant threat of war? Then, later, can the people of any modern highly industrialized society also have a high degree of freedom, or must the state be their enemy? Can any society flourish without some form of ruling elite?

Stalin's Role in general.....

[FONT=Arial]These questions are all peculiarly modern, arising in the epoch of capitalism as it reaches its highest form, modern imperialism, and becoming critical in our own time, the era of global revolution. Each of these questions leads us inevitably to Stalin. In my opinion, it is not going too far to say that Stalin is the key figure of our era.
[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]All the achievements and all the failures, all the strengths and all the weaknesses, of the Soviet revolution and indeed of the world revolution in the period 1922-53 are summed up in Stalin. This is not to say that he is personally responsible for all that was and was not accomplished, or that nobody else could have done what he did. We are not dealing with a "great man" theory of history. In fact, quite the opposite. If we are to understand Stalin at all, and evaluate him from the point of View of either of two major opposing classes, we must see him, like all historical figures, as a being created by his times and containing the contradictions of those times. .
[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]Every idea of Stalin's, as he would be the first to admit, came to him from his historical existence, which also fixed limits to the ideas available to him. He could study history in order to learn from the experience of the Paris Commune but he could not look into a crystal ball to benefit from the lessons of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. And the decisions he made also had fixed and determined limits on either Side, as we shall see.
[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]To appraise Stalin, the best way to begin is to compare the condition of the Soviet Union and the rest of the world at two times: when he came into leadership and when he died. Without such a comparison, it is impossible to measure what he may have contributed or taken away from human progress. If the condition of the Soviet people was much better when he died than when he took power, he cannot have made their lives worse. The worst that can be said is that they would have progressed more without him. The same is true for the world revolution. Was it set back during the decades of his leadership, or did it advance? Once we put the questions this way, the burden of proof falls on those who deny Stalin's positive role as a revolutionary leader.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]As World War I began, the Russian Empire consisted primarily of vast undeveloped lands inhabited by many different peoples speaking a variety of languages with a very low level of literacy, productivity, technology, and health. Feudal Social relations still prevailed throughout many of these lands. Czarist secret police, officially organized bands of military terrorists, and a vast bureaucracy were deployed to keep the hungry masses of workers and peasants in line.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]The war brought these problems to a crisis. Millions went to their deaths wearing rags, with empty stomachs, often waiting for those in front of them to fall so they could have a rifle and a few rounds of ammunition. When the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, the entire vast empire, including the great cities of Russia itself, was in chaos.
[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]Before the new government could begin to govern, it was Immediately set upon by the landlords, capitalists, and generals of the old regime, with all the forces they could buy and muster, together with combined military forces of Britain, France, Japan, and Poland, and additional military contingents from the U.S. and other capitalist countries. A vicious civil war raged for three years, from Siberia through European Russia, from the White Sea to the Ukraine. At the end of the Civil War, in 1920, agricultural output was less than half that of the prewar poverty stricken countryside. Even worse was the situation in industry.
[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]Many mines and factories had been destroyed. Transport had been torn up. Stocks of raw materials and semi finished products had been exhausted. The output of large-scale industry was about one seventh of what it had been before the war. And the fighting against foreign military intervention had to go on for two more years. Japanese and U.S. troops still held a portion of Siberia, including the key port city of Vladivostok, which was not recaptured until 1922.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]Lenin suffered his first stroke in 1922. From this point on, Stalin, who was the General Secretary of the Central Committee, began to emerge as the principal leader of the Party. Stalin's policies were being implemented at least as early as 1924, the year of Lenin's death, and by 1927 the various opposing factions had been defeated and expelled from the Party. It is the period of the early and mid-1920S that we must compare to 1953.
[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]The Soviet Union of the early 1920S was a land of deprivation. Hunger was everywhere, and actual mass famines swept across much of the countryside. Industrial production was extremely low, and the technological Level of industry was so backward that there seemed little possibility of mechanizing agriculture. Serious rebellions in the armed forces were breaking out, most notably at the Kronstadt garrison in 1921.
[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]By 1924 large-scale peasant revolts were erupting, particularly in Georgia. There was virtually no electricity outside the large cities. Agriculture was based on the peasant holdings and medium-sized farms seized by rural capitalists (the kulaks) who forced the peasants back into wage Labor and tenant fanning. Health care was almost non-existent in much of the country. The technical knowledge and skills needed to develop modern industry, agriculture, health, and education were concentrated in the hands of a few, mostly opposed to socialism while the vast majority of the population were illiterate and could hardly think about education while barely managing to subsist. The Soviet Union was isolated in a world controlled by powerful capitalist countries physically surrounding it, setting up economic blockades, and officially refusing to recognize its existence while outdoing each other in their pledges to wipe out this Red menace.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]The counterrevolution was riding high throughout Europe Great Britain, and even in the U.S.A., where the Red threat was used as an excuse to smash labor unions. Fascism was emerging in several parts of the capitalist world, particularly in Japan and in Italy, where Mussolini took dictatorial power in 1924. Most of the world consisted of colonies and neo-colonies of the European powers.
[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]When Stalin died in 1953, the Soviet Union was the second greatest industrial, scientific, and military power in the world and showed clear signs of moving to overtake the U.S. in all these areas. This was despite the devastating losses it suffered while defeating the fascist powers of Germany, Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria. The various peoples of the U.S.S.R. were unified. Starvation and illiteracy were unknown throughout the country. Agriculture was completely collectivized and extremely productive. Preventive health care was the finest in the world, and medical treatment of exceptionally high quality was available free to all citizens. Education at all levels was free. More books were published in the U.S.S.R. than in any other country. There was no unemployment.
[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, not only had the main fascist powers of 1922-45 been defeated, but the forces of revolution were on the rise everywhere. The Chinese Communist Party had just led one fourth of the world's population to victory over foreign imperialism and domestic feudalism and capitalism. Half of Korea was socialist, and the U.S.-British imperialist army, having rushed to intervene in the civil war under the banner of the United Nations was on the defensive and hopelessly demoralized. In Vietnam, strong socialist power, which had already defeated Japanese Imperialism, was administering the final blows to the beaten army of the French empire. The monarchies and fascist military dictatorships of Eastern Europe had been destroyed by a combination of partisan forces, led by local Communists, and the Soviet Army; everywhere except for Greece there were now governments that supported the world revolution and at least claimed to be governments of the workers and peasants. The largest political party in both France and Italy was the Communist Party. The national liberation movement among the European colonies and neo-colonies was surging forward. Between 1946 and 1949 alone, at least nominal national independence was achieved by Burma, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Laos, Libya, Ceylon, Jordan, and the Philippines, countries comprising about one third of the world’s population. The entire continent of Africa was stirring.
[/FONT]
Everybody but the Trotskyites, and even some of them would have to admit that the situation for the Communist world revolution was incomparably advanced in 1953 over what it had been in the early or mid 1920s. Of course, that does not settle the Stalin question. We still have to ask whether Stalin contributed to this tremendous advance, or slowed it down or had negligible influence on it. And we must not duck the question as to whether Stalin's theory and practice built such serious faults into revolutionary communism that its later failures, particularly in the Soviet Union, can be pinned on him.