I'm not Stalinist, but it goes like this: What purges?
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How do Stalinists defend the purges?
I've always been curious about this but never seen or heard any Stalinists speak about this topic.
How do they actually defend the purges, if at all? If they don't, what is their analysis of them?
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I'm not Stalinist, but it goes like this: What purges?
They usually say that it was necessary because if they didn't get rid of all the Trotskyists,"spies" fascists (aka: anyone who was forced to confess under torture)and other supposed enemies than the USSR would have been defeated.
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They all seem to believe that the people who confessed and such actually did what they did, without taking into context anything about the system at that time, then they try to morally pan off the people who were murdered by saying "mistakes were made".
honestly i find little utility in breast beating etc. over mistakes dudes made in the past.
You don't think discussing the removal of certain ideological trends by a marxist-leninist state helps describe the ideology of said ideology? Or even on the wider subject of the state using the purges to firm up it's hold over the country?
no, because there's no possible g.d. honest discourse possible in this discussion. it turns into an opportunity for a tendency war.
as for "the ideological trends" of the marxist-leninist state, fidel didn't purge shit.
But as has been noted in the Fidel thread, Fidel's supposed "Marxist-Leninist" tendencies are rather suspect. I think as someone else noted in the thread in question, Fidel's politics were a sort of pre-cursor to Chavez's today.
Yeah, Fidel purged plenty of people, though. The concept of purging the Party originated with Lenin I'm afraid.
Originally Posted by Lenin;Originally Posted by Lenin;
its a fair cop. but again, are we some kind of tendency litmus test here?
e: and of course there needs to be a regulation of who is at the till of party control.
What is at stake here are not purges in the party conceived in abstract - as the questioning of legitimacy of a part of the party deciding that some sections or individuals need to be thrown out.
Those who bring up the issue of historical purges, especially in relation to Soviet Russia in the 30s, usually focus on punitive measures and false allegations which are to be understood in the context of the cementing of political rule of the group centered around Stalin.
As such, the issue is very important, if not for functioning as a barometer of one's conception of the party, its relation to the whole class, and to forms of poolitical rule.
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The quotes you provided weren't advocating purging in the same manner as Stalin preferred.The way I read those quotes was: Lenin wanted said members kicked out of the party,Stalin wanted them killed.
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i guess he missed Stalin. besides as Marcel Leibman goes over in "Leninism Under Lenin," when Lenin "purged" a person or group, they weren't actually killed or assassinated. And it was never on the scale or never had the same purpose of Stalin's purges. There's no point in debating this though, Stalinists have a cultish adherence to their party's politics and view on history.
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I think the point being made was that, whilst it's true that Lenin never 'killed' party people in purges, he provided a framework where the politics of the state was such that the state was the party, the party was the state and both had direct control over who could become part of the bureaucratic, decision-making apparatus. It was almost inevitable that, should a leader like Stalin come along, it would be possible for the purges to take on an altogether more sinister character.
Setting aside the figure of Stalin, which is just a question of dogma at this point, my aim was to show that purging the party as such is not a deviation from Lenin. Therefore, OP's question should be either be phrased as "How do Leninists actually defend the purges, if at all? If they don't, what is their analysis of them?", or not at all.
That said, purges in virtue of themselves, in my opinion, are a perfectly natural and just defensive mechanism, especially but not exclusively in the universe of Leninism. I mean, consider the alternatives. Take Lenin's proposal at face value: that "dubious", "unreliable" and "dishonest" "rascals" have wormed their way into a post-revolutionary vanguard, either in order to advance their careers, or for some other malicious reason, under the new order. Be honest: don't we all know people like this? How would you justify not taking action under those circumstances? Particularly in light of Lenin's exhortation to act on the complaints of the "non-Party proletarian masses... The working masses have a fine intuition, which enables them to distinguish honest and devoted Communists from those who arouse the disgust of people earning their bread by the sweat of their brow" ?
Except that that is not true at all. Party purges in the pre-Stalin era differed from the Great Purge in scale, form and motive. To gloss over these and claim that a purge in 1921 was the same as a purge in 1937 is simply incorrect
Indeed such a comparison actually validates the Stalinist purges by suggesting that they were not murderous and panicked campaigns to enhance Stalin's control over the party apparatus but rather a "natural and just defensive mechanism"
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The problem here is that your theory re: "dubious, unreliable and dishonest rascals" doesn't translate well into praxis. Really, it is quite obvious that when Leninists say these types of things, they merely are trying to encapsulate the entire non-Leninist left. It is clear that the Marxist-Leninists view themselves as the only part of the left that is not anti-Socialism, and therein lies the problem: they cannot participate, democratically, with other leftists, hence purges, dictatorship etc.
Well first of all, Lenin's purging was a banishment from the bolshevik party. He wanted Kamanev and Zinoviev purged at one point for making publishments public about fractions in the bolshevik party. That didn't mean he wanted to kill them, it meant he was kicking them out of the Bolsheviks.
Second of all, i'm sure it's not okay for Makhno to purge that general of his that progromed the jewish villages without any orders from Makhno himself, since he killed the guy who defied his rule, which is the definition of a purge, right? Considerable purges were underway in even most anarchist movements, so it's simply a matter of ridding a party of undesirable elements. I'm not condoning killing anybody, i'm condoning kicking a nazi out of a revolutionary leftist group.
I want to see a list of people who were kicked out of the bolshevik party under Lenin, and see the reason they were in fact purged, and then see the names of people Stalin killed, i.e. every old bolshevik, tuchatkeveky and most of the senior red army staff, and see the reasons behing the ones that were purged then, to compare the nature of the purges.
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"[I]t’s hard to keep potent historical truths bottled up forever. New data repositories are uncovered. New, less ideological, generations of historians grow up. In the late 1980s and before, Ann Druyan and I would routinely smuggle copies of Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution into the USSR—so our colleagues could know a little about their own political beginnings.”
--Carl Sagan
And those sorts of purges are justifiable. It was from a time when many outside elements, social revolutionaries, mensheviks, etc, were entering the party. Obviously there was a need to prune the crop a little bit.
Also, purges at that point in time were usually a simple dismissal from the party, nothing like what it later became.
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They admit that the full 600k-1.2 million died, but they claim that all of them were spies/fascists/traitors and that the deaths were justified.
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