/marx/ - Marxism

>>2480

The Spanish Republic was viewed as a significant advance over the feudal order which the monarchy had symbolized. The Popular Front was founded to carry out the bourgeois-democratic tasks of the Spanish revolution. Following its victory in the polls the most reactionary segments of society (the feudal landowners, military officers, church leaders, and comprador bourgeoisie linked with British capital, among other forces) staged a fascist rebellion. Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy came to the assistance of the rebels and their military "aid" was of such an extent as to constitute not just a struggle against reaction, but a national liberation war as well.

The Communist Party of Spain played a leading role in the anti-fascist resistance both politically and militarily. Under its influence the Republic enacted various reforms and important steps were taken towards creating a united army from the disparate militias.

The Communists called for unity with the Socialist Party, the Anarchists and the left-wing Republicans. Efforts were made to merge the Communist and Socialist parties, but many of the leading Socialists were fearful of losing their entrenched positions and thus hindered that aspect of working-class unity. Likewise ultra-left elements among the Anarchists and the POUM undermined anti-fascist unity, tried to skip stages of the revolution, and at worst became unwitting dupes of fascism. There were many Anarchists who did struggle for anti-fascist unity though, such as Durruti whose death was mourned by the Communists and the Soviet press.

The USSR itself was the only country to send any real assistance to the Republic. Its military forces were indispensable in the Republic surviving the fascist attempt to capture Madrid early in the war. It also assisted the security of the Republic in the rear.

The logic of events in Spain meant that the Communists were consolidating their leading role in all aspects of Spanish life and after the war would be in a position to transform the bourgeois-democratic revolution into a socialist revolution. For this reason right-wing elements among the Popular Front sowed defeatist sentiments and called for a "negotiated peace" with Franco. An anti-communist coup was carried out against the Negrín government and thus stabbed in the back the anti-fascist struggle and resulted in the victory of Franco's forces.

Two useful reads on this subject, although written in the period of Soviet revisionism:

* https://archive.org/details/Spain19361939

* http://espressostalinist.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/espana.pdf

I refuse to believe no one else has questions about Joseph Stalin. For that reason I will bump this.

>>2502

Because the fiction novel you've read said so.

What was Stalin, and consequentially the Soviet Union under him, position on Mao and on the Chinese Revolution as opposed to his (Stalin's) factional enemies?

>>2524

During WWII Stalin referred to Mao as a "margarine communist," and said to a delegation of the CPC in 1949 that, "As far as I know in the CPC there is a thin layer of the proletariat and the nationalist sentiments are very strong and if you will not conduct genuinely Marxist-Leninist class policies and not conduct struggle against bourgeois nationalism, the nationalists will strangle you. Then not only will socialist construction be terminated, China may become a dangerous toy in the hands of American imperialists."

As for the character of the Chinese Revolution, he said in 1950: " What is People's Democracy? It contains at least such features as: 1) Political power being in the hands of the proletariat; 2) nationalisation of the industry; 3) the guiding role of the Communist and Working Peoples' Parties; 4) the construction of Socialism not only in the towns but also in the countryside. In China we cannot even talk about the building of Socialism either in the towns or in the countryside. Some enterprises have been nationalised but this is a drop in the ocean. The main mass of industrial commodities for the population is produced by artisans. There are about 30 million artisans in China. There are important dissimilarities between the countries of Peoples' Democracy and the Peoples' Republic of China: 1) In China there exists a democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, something akin to what the Bolsheviks talked about in 1904-05. 2) There was oppression by a foreign bourgeoisie in China, therefore the national bourgeoisie of China is partially revolutionary; in view of this a coalition with the national bourgeoisie is permissible, in China the communists and the bourgeoisie comprise a bloc. This is not unnatural. Marx in 1848 also had a coalition with the bourgeoisie, when he was editing the Neue Rheinische Zeitung , but it was not for long. 3) In China they still face the task of the liquidation of feudal relationships, and in this sense the Chinese revolution reminds one of the French bourgeois revolution of 1789. 4) The special feature of the Chinese revolution is that the Communist Party stands at the head of the state. Therefore, one can say that in China there is a Peoples' Democratic Republic but only at its first stage of development."

>>2541

Considering that many of the economic and social problems plaguing the USSR by the time Gorbachev came to power had their roots in the "reforms" carried out after Stalin's death, yes.

>>2545

First, the Soviets had tried to get the Polish government to participate in mutual defense efforts against Nazi aggression. Said government, being reactionary, itself fascist-inspired, and having ambitions on Soviet territory, refused. Second, the Nazis had intended to invade Poland with or without a non-aggression pact with the Soviets.

When the Nazis invaded the Polish government fled. The eastern portion of the country had been annexed to the Polish regime in 1920 and was inhabited by oppressed majorities of Ukrainians and Byelorussians who had struggled since then for national liberation. Since the Polish government fled, the Nazis considered it permissible to move into these areas as well.

The Soviets stopped them. All they were "partitioning" was a part of Poland that was not actually Polish and which had been annexed to Poland twenty years earlier.

See: https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/mlg09/did_ussr_invade_poland.html

As for the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and Soviet attitudes towards the Nazis in general, see Chapters VI and VII of "The Stalin Era" by Anna Louise Strong, which can be downloaded from here: http://www.plp.org/books/

Stalin demands more questions about him.

>>2554

>Stalin demands more questions about him.

...under penalty of gulag?

>>2560

To safeguard the security of Leningrad in any future conflict with Nazi Germany. Before the war with Finland he had tried to negotiate with the Finnish government. The actual Finnish negotiators thought the Soviet proposals were reasonable, but the anti-communist government rejected them.

See: http://ml-review.ca/aml/CommunistLeague/CL-FINLANDWAR90.html

There's a good academic account of the whole issue in "Stalin's Wars" by Geoffrey Roberts.

As one source notes: "Hostilities between Finland and the Soviet Union ended on March 13, 1940. According to the peace terms, Finland ceded to Russia the Karelian Isthmus, the western and northern shores of Lake Lagoda, a number of strategic islands in the Gulf of Finland essential to the defense of Leningrad. The Soviet Government restored to Finland the port of Petsamo, which had been occupied by the Red Army, and took a thirty-year lease on the Hango peninsula for an annual rental of 8,000,000 Finnish marks. Addressing the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. on March 29, Molotov declared: 'The Soviet Union, having smashed the Finnish Army and having every opportunity of occupying the whole of Finland, did not do so and did not demand any indemnities for expenditures in the war as any other Power would have done, but confined its desires to a minimum.'"

>>2562

I am of the view that following Stalin's death a process of capitalist restoration was initiated. His last work "Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R." (in which he debunked a number of erroneous views on political economy) was practically abandoned as soon as he died. Various economic "reforms" were undertaken at once, and expanded in subsequent years.

These changes to the economy eventually constituted the restoration of capitalism under a "socialist" verbiage. A new bourgeoisie emerged. Obviously under such a system economic planning could only be partially implemented, and many adverse phenomena arose.

Important reads:

* http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv1n1/marksoc.htm

* http://marx2mao.com/Other/RCSU75.html

* http://bannedthought.net/USSR/index.htm

* http://www.oneparty.co.uk/html/book/ussrmenu.html

Why did Stalin denounce cybernetics as one of the worst bourgeois deviations? Seems like a really stupid missed opportunity.

The US military was scared of potential Soviet cybernetic research:

http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/aureview/1967/mar-apr/sleeper.html

>>2566

>The US military was scared of potential Soviet cybernetic research

Well yeah, many bourgeois corporations (including those involved in "defense" spending) at the time had exaggerated conceptions of the possibilities of cybernetics.

To quote from Red Papers #7:

>Thus even those [Soviet, pro-cybernetics and technocratic] economists who opposed the wholesale reintroduction of capitalist criteria and relations were infected with the revisionist approach. Their solution to the problems of the Soviet economy was to find fool-proof techniques for allocating resources and measuring success, planning gimmicks that not even the cleverest and most crooked manager could distort or outwit. All of their solutions for straightening out the Soviet economy called for putting technique in command.

>Some extremists called for a planning process virtually untouched by human hands. Giant computers were to survey the needs of every enterprise and household in the conomy in physical terms, draw up a national plan balancing expansion of production with consumption and allocating resources and production quotas, then analyze and evaluate the execution of the plan. The problem of programming the computer to achieve the optimum political solution to economic problems, to take into account the complexities of class relationships in the socialist period, was not discussed at all, and of course, was not possible at all.

It was a doctrine idealist at best and elitist at worst. It is no surprise that after Stalin's death a number of revisionists, both among the intelligentsia and among the armed forces, saw cybernetics as a panacea and were able to promote it alongside the other revisionist theorists (who later won out for practical reasons.) They had a non-proletarian outlook and sought to replace dialectics with "systems theory," among other philosophical deviations.

That being said, the Soviets under Lenin and Stalin gave importance to technological development, including computers. The struggle against pro-cybernetics types shouldn't be confused with the idea that computing itself and its contribution to economic planning was denounced.

>>2579

On a literally personal level? None, he was an atheist.

Under Stalin the struggle against religion initiated in Lenin's time was continued. For example,

"The laws of our country recognise the right of every citizen to profess any religion. That is a matter for the conscience of each individual. That is precisely why we separated the church from the state. But in separating the church from the state and proclaiming freedom of conscience we at the same time preserved the right of every citizen to combat religion, all religion, by argument, by propaganda and agitation. The Party cannot be neutral towards religion, and it conducts anti-religious propaganda against all religious prejudices because it stands for science, whereas religious prejudices run counter to science, because all religion is the antithesis of science. Cases such as occur in America, where Darwinists were prosecuted recently, cannot occur here because the Party pursues a policy of defending science in every way...

Have we repressed the reactionary clergy? Yes, we have. The only unfortunate thing is that they have not yet been completely eliminated. Anti-religious propaganda is the means by which the elimination of the reactionary clergy will be completely carried through. Cases occur sometimes when certain members of the Party hinder the full development of anti-religious propaganda. If such members are expelled it is a very good thing, because there is no room for such 'Communists' in the ranks of our Party."

(J.V. Stalin. Works Vol. 10. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. 1954. pp. 138-139.)

During WWII there was not only a struggle to defend the new socialist society, but also a national struggle against an enemy that, besides being anti-communist, was also of the opinion that Slavs were subhuman and worthy of extermination. For this reason the campaign against religion was subordinated to more pressing needs.

After the war the struggle against religion increased, but not to the same level as before the war. In large part this was because the new society demonstrated its "national" credentials by beating back the Nazis. The Orthodox Church could no longer pose as the only force "really" upholding the national culture and traditions of the Russians, Ukrainians, etc., and the clergy largely reconciled with the state on this basis.

>>2671

See Chapter 23 (for example) of: http://marx2mao.com/Other/RCSU75.html

Most examples of inefficiency caused by the reforms were from issues of Peking Review back in the day if I'm remembering correctly.

In Eastern Europe the post-Stalin "reforms" definitely harmed the economies. In Poland for example there was mass decollectivization, meaning that 80% of the countryside remained in private hands thereafter. This caused Polish agriculture various problems, especially since the state had to subsidize the private farmers who were too weak to stay independent. Poland, Hungary and Romania as IMF members also accrued gigantic debts. In Poland this necessitated international "supervision" of its economy after 1980, in Romania it led to the infamous austerity measures of that decade to pay back the debt, and in Hungary it led to the demise of all the revisionist "socialist" governments in Eastern Europe when the Hungarians agreed to a West German loan in exchange for opening up the border with East Germany.

What were the purges of the 1930s about, considering that most mainstream sources attribute them to paranoia? Who were the actual victims and what is the closest estimate of the number of people affected by them? I know the famine should not be included in this since it wasn't really part of the actual purges or even Stalin's fault for that matter but I'd like to know the basic details about that as well since it's so often brought up by both liberals and revisionists alike.

>>2479

I have several questions

>>2554

>>2555

>>2701

I'll quote what I wrote elsewhere:

>Two good reads on the Great Purges from a bourgeois perspective are "Origins of the Great Purges" by J. Arch Getty and "Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia" by Robert Thurston. You can find the first one here: http://bookzz.org/book/989260/2309c7

>In short, it was a combination of fear of the fact that anti-Soviet conspiracies did exist among the déclassé elements, armed forces and party members, and the fact that local party bosses often sought to sabotage policies encouraged by "Moscow" (aka central party and state organs) in order to keep themselves entrenched in power.

>As both books show, workers were an active participant in the purges, denouncing corrupt and self-serving party officials as well as managers in enterprises. "Moscow" promoted greater democracy and open criticism in order to achieve its objectives of getting rid of potentially hostile elements. NKVD heads Yagoda and Yezhov had their own interests and tried to direct events in accordance with them.

>In other words, the whole "Stalin was afraid of his rivals and wanted to kill them all" narrative has no basis. Both works rely heavily on Soviet archival materials and I can't recommend them enough.

>>2703

>Wasn't the USSR that Stalin was leader of not even a true Communist state? The state was still Capital, yes? I'm really only aware of the bad that Stalin did, sadly. Was Stalin a good person?

Specify what you mean by "a true Communist state." The USSR obviously didn't consider itself to have achieved communism (that would be silly), but it did claim to have achieved socialism in the main. "Capital" does not refer to countries, it refers to the economic process whereby the capitalist obtains surplus-value.

>And the Russia he controlled seems very tolatarian too me.

What is "totalitarian" in this context? Define it.

>>2707

Ask away.

>>2714

>I might have already said this, but isn't a 'communist state', kind of an oxymoron?

More or less. Stalin pointed out that some form of "state" will exist in the course of the construction of communism, but obviously it will look substantially different from the state under socialism and will finally wither away with the triumph of communism across the world.

>Basically, wasn't Russia under a lot of Government control?

Well yes, but so is every government. "Totalitarianism" is a buzzword. Every class in power seeks to mould society in its own image, that's the point of the relationship between the base (economic system) and superstructure (culture, education, etc.) In a society where the means of production are socialized and there is no private press and the like the atmosphere would seem unusual to someone accustomed to a society ruled under private property and individualism, but the "totalitarian" hegemony of the bourgeoisie is very much real: they treat bourgeois democracy as the only form of democracy and stress the view that capitalism is an eternal system, etc. through the educational institutions and mass media.

See for example: http://theredphoenixapl.org/2009/09/10/the-myth-of-totalitarianism/

>Was soviet Russia and the USSR as a whole, a very successful nation?

Under Lenin and Stalin yes, just about any standard bourgeois historical work will acknowledge the many social gains won through the October Revolution and under Lenin's leadership, and the economic transformation of society carried out under Stalin.

>Are most of the things the West spout about Communism untrue? Was it all really just propaganda?

Many of the claims made in the West are to a large extent either untrue or distorted. For the first two or three years after the revolution the Bolsheviks were literally portrayed as madmen who were committing all sorts of untrue atrocities and carrying out seemingly insane policies (such as collectivizing women.) That sort of blatant propaganda became rarer as time went on, but was never entirely erased.

>Can you point out any at all flaws with the way Stalin ran things?

No. Many of the claims made by the Soviet revisionists that he "violated collective leadership" and whatnot were basically untrue. There were issues on which Stalin didn't get his way with others.

>Did Stalin appreciate art and culture? Or was a lot of art censored?

See: http://ml-review.ca/aml/AllianceIssues/A2004/STALINART.html

In brief, Stalin, like Lenin, supported the arts and opposed ultra-leftist and right-wing deviations on this issue. He supported Gorky, Mayakovsky and others who were being attacked by advocates of so-called "proletarian culture."

>Lets talk hypothetically here. Soviet Russia somehow topples the US government. Do you think the world would be better off in this future where Communism reigns supreme, or a future where the Capitalist West is the dominate Economic System?

In this situation the Cold War would either never happen or would have ended in a victory for the socialist camp (assuming this is the 1940s-50s.) This would mean that the Soviets would have been able to spend far less on defense needs than actually occurred IRL and pretty much makes its domestic and international situation dramatically better in ever way. So yes, that would obviously be of great benefit not just to the USSR or a proletarian-led USA, but to the entire world.

>Would Marx have approved Stalin's time as one of the leading figures in the USSR?

Marx died in 1883. We can't really predict what people would have "thought" about someone who acted decades later. Neither Marx or Engels lived to see a successful proletarian revolutio and an attempt to construct socialism. Lenin and Stalin certainly viewed themselves as following in Marx's and Engels' course, and I would say they did so in all fundamentals and intentions, and that is what matters.

>Was Stalin a good-hearted person? From some of the quotes I've heard from him he seems kind of cold.

You should find this of definite interest: https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/stalinludwig_missing_eng.html

>>2715

Yes, this is basically the "Stalinist" board (broadly defined.)

>>2718

As far as biographies of Stalin go, probably the best in terms of learning things about him (they're all against him as a person, but still useful) are Ian Grey's "Stalin: Man of History," Adam Ulam's "Stalin: The Man and His Era," and the recently-released Volume I of Kotkin's "Stalin" (there is no Volume II yet.)

I haven't actually read it but I hear that "Stalin: Man of Contradiction" is a good introductory biography. Conveniently it also happens to be online: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B7trXEFcZimVS0tiSEF2cmRHRjg/edit

As far as Stalin's views on things go, "The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin" by Erik Van Ree has useful information and can be found here: http://bookzz.org/book/700295/bb24ad

There's also "Stalin: A New History" which isn't a biography but it does contain interesting chapters (my personal favorite is the one on Stalin's interaction with the team that produced his official Soviet biography): http://bookzz.org/book/730815/3b3557

For Stalin as a wartime leader see "Stalin's Wars" by Geoffrey Roberts. For Stalin pre-1917 see "Young Stalin" by Montefiore; although he's especially keen on shitting all over Stalin for everything it's still a good read.

There are many other books on Stalin, but all these should give a good introduction.

>>2723

From what I know he didn't read many literary works in his adult life. In his youth he read the works of various Georgian writers, Tolstoy, Gogol, Victor Hugo, Thackeray, Balzac (the last three in Russian translation of course) and a few others. I dunno what he read when he was an adult; his library was large but the bulk of it was political and other non-fiction literature.

>>2729

No. Lenin's so-called "testament" mentioned Stalin, Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Pyatakov. His purpose wasn't to propose that any one of these be "appointed" at his suggestion, he was concerned that the Central Committee would suffer a split which would weaken the ability of the party to lead the country in the difficult period it was in.

The general consensus seems to be that Stalin was fond of Zhdanov, who died in 1948. Afterwards he was closer to Malenkov, who played a prominent role at the 19th Party Congress in 1952 and was recognized as the country's leader after Stalin died in 1953.

But he never formally proclaimed any "successor" either publicly or privately. He was more or less healthy by the time he died, unlike Lenin who was bedridden and barely capable of communicating.

What about the gulags? How bad were they, and what kinds of people were sent?

>>2735

"There was no systematic extermination of inmates, no gas chambers or crematoria to dispose of millions of bodies. Despite harsh conditions, the great majority of gulag inmates survived and eventually returned to society when granted amnesty or when their terms were finished. In any given year, 20 to 40 percent of the inmates were released, according to [Soviet, hitherto classified] archive records." (Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds, page 79.) Furthermore most of them, as Parenti notes, were obvious criminals: rapists, murderers and the like.

Conditions in the gulags were subpar for the fairly obvious reason that conditions in the rest of the country were backwards to begin with compared to the West. Priority obviously went to improving the living standards of society rather than conditions in the camps, which were thus short of medicine and other important materials.

Furthermore, as noted in "The Economics of Forced Labor: The Soviet Gulag" by Gregory and Lazarev (bourgeois authors, not at all inclined towards the USSR) the whole system was being curtailed by the time of Stalin's death since maintaining it was not worth the costs.

>>2746

In the sense that he unilaterally decided everything? No. There were cases when his objection to something was overruled.

Also, to quote from J. Arch Getty's article "Stalin as Prime Minister" in Davies and Harris, "Stalin: A New History," pp. 94-97:

>Thousands of decisions were taken at Politburo level that directly affected the real lives of real people no less than questions of global strategy, and Stalin did not take them all. Aside from the laconic Politburo protocols and the spotty memoir evidence, we now have a unique set of sources for the 1930s shedding light on decisionmaking in the inner circle: the correspondence between Stalin and L.M. Kaganovich while the former was on his lengthy annual holidays in the south. During Stalin’s absences, Kaganovich as tacit Second Secretary of the Central Committee, supervised decision-making in Moscow while in communication with Stalin...

>On the face of it, it seems quite remarkable that a micromanaging dictator would absent himself for three months per year to a faraway place with no telephone during what had become the most crucial season of all for the Soviet economy: harvest time. One cannot imagine a British prime minister or American president so absenting her/himself, with or without a telephone...

>Looking closely at one of these periods can be quite revealing.1934 was the last period of Stalin’s absence without a telephone. It was also the busiest year of the 1930s for Politburo resolutions: there were 3,945 decisions listed on Politburo protocols for that year and the Politburo met forty-six times. During Stalin’s holiday (August through October, 1934), more than a quarter of Politburo decisions (1,038 of the year’s 3,945) were registered and sixteen of the Politburo’s forty-six meetings took place without Stalin’s presence...

>Politburo members took a large number of decisions without Stalin’s participation. Stalin intervened in only 119 (11 per cent) of the 1,038 recorded Politburo decisions taken during his vacation in 1934. The great majority of his interventions (91 of 119, or 76 per cent) were responses to initiatives from Kaganovich. The remainder consists of points first raised by Stalin. These numbers show that of all Politburo decisions taken in these three months, Stalin either did not respond to, or routinely confirmed, his lieutenants’ decisions 96 per cent of the time. Of his replies to Kaganovich’s requests for guidance, he confirmed his lieutenants’ proposal or decision without modification 84 per cent of the time...

>Stalin left many matters to Kaganovich and the other Politburo members for decision, and many of them were not trivial...

>On some very important questions, Stalin contented himself with providing general guidance or exhortation and then turning the matter over to Kaganovich and the team...

>he often seems to have delegated more in the 1930s than previously. In September 1933, he wrote from his holiday location to Kaganovich and the Politburo in Moscow: ‘I cannot and should not have to decide any and all questions that animate the Politburo ... you yourselves can consider things and work them out.’

>>2746

Also relevant to your question is this excerpt from a pamphlet by Anna Louise Strong, "Dictatorship and Democracy in the Soviet Union," 1934, pp. 16-18:

>It is "authority" rather than "power" that Stalin himself possesses. Though his standing is far higher than that of any other man in the Soviet Union, though he is cheered and quoted at all congresses, whether of governmental delegates, trade unions or farms, yet no one inquires what is Stalin's purpose or Stalin's will. They inquire what is Stalin's analysis of the situation, his summing up of problems and most important steps. I was struck at once by the contrast when I left the Soviet Union and visited Berlin and Washington. In Berlin I saw motion picture films bearing inscriptions: "Approved by Herr Von —, leader of our youth," and was startled. No individual "approves" a film or book or drama in the U.S.S.R. In Washington I heard men say: "We do not yet know what the President will decide. No one is yet quite certain of his intentions." Men do not speak thus in the U.S.S.R. of Stalin.

>Let me give a brief example of how Stalin functions. I saw him preside at a small committee meeting, deciding a matter on which I had brought a complaint. He summoned to his office all the persons concerned in the matter, but when we arrived we found ourselves meeting not only with Stalin, but also with Voroshiloff and Kaganovich. Stalin sat down, not at the head of the table, but informally placed where he could see the faces of all. He opened the talk with a plain, direct question, repeating the complaint in one sentence and asking the man complained against: "Why was it necessary to do this?"

>After this he said less than anyone. An occasional phrase, a word without pressure; even his questions were less demands for answers than interjections guiding the speakers' thought. But how swiftly everything was revealed, all our hopes, egotisms, conflicts, all the things we had been doing to each other. The essential nature of men I had known for years and of others I met for the first time came out sharply, more clearly than I had ever seen them, yet without prejudice. Each of them had to cooperate, to be taken account of in a problem; the job we must do and its direction became clear.

>I was hardly conscious of the part played by Stalin in helping us reach a decision; I thought of him rather as someone superlatively easy to explain things to, who got one's meaning half through a sentence and brought it all out very quickly. When everything became clear and not a moment sooner or later, Stalin turned to the others: "Well?" A word from one, a phrase from another, together accomplished a sentence. Nods—it was unanimous. It seemed we had all decided, simultaneously, unanimously.

>That is Stalin's method and greatness... "I can analyze and plan with the workers of one plant for a period of several months," said a responsible Communist to me. "Others, much wiser than I, like men on our Central Committee, can plan with wider masses for years. Stalin is in this our ablest. He sees the interrelation of our path with world events, and the order of each step, as a man sees the earth from the stratosphere. But the men of our Central Committee take his analysis not because it is Stalin's but because it is dear and convincing and documented with facts."

>When Stalin reports to a congress of the party, or of the farm champions, or the heads of industry, none of his statements can be ranked as new. They are statements heard already on the lips of millions throughout the land. But he puts them together more completely than anyone else...

>Men never speak in the Soviet Union of "Stalin's policy" but always of the "party line," which Stalin "reports" in its present aspects, but does not "make." The party line is accessible to all to study, to know and to help formulate within the limits set by the Revolution's goal. There have indeed been statements by Stalin which have ushered in new epochs, as when he told a conference of Agrarian Marxists that the time had come to "liquidate the kulaks as a class." Yet he announced merely the time for a process which every Communist knew was eventually on the program.

>>2750

Quoting from Robert Thurston, "Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia," 1996, p. 144:

>Considerable evidence shows that even many of those close to the centers of power did not feel apprehension, let alone sense its pervasive presence, into 1937 or later. Those who say that they were personally afraid of arrest earlier than that are the exception, not the rule. The accounts that do mention fear almost invariably refer to a situation among the country's elite, not to the population as a whole.

Both Thurston (in that same book) and Getty point out that many workers took the opportunity during 1936-38 to denounce corrupt and self-serving managers and party officials. The "Great Terror" coincided with increased democracy within the party and society as a whole.

There's no single book that will give you the average life of every Soviet citizen, but a good read is "Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia's City of Steel" by John Scott, who worked to build up Magnitogorsk and was witness both to the enthusiastic attitude of the workers who genuinely felt they were building a new future as well as to the subpar living conditions and many accidents on the job. Along the way Scott also discusses instances of workplace democracy, the impact of the Stakhanovites, etc.

There's numerous "eyewitness" works of this type, by both Soviet and foreign citizens. As for academic treatments, they're just as (if not more) numerous. Here's an example that deals with the postwar period: http://bookzz.org/book/813582/c9432b

Kind of broad, but what was the relationship between Stalin and Zhukov like?

>>2768

Stalin's leadership during WWII is one of those subjects I'm not very interested in, but after the war they were strained. One reason is that Zhukov was claiming excessive credit for himself. Another is that, as quoted by the anti-Stalin Soviet dissident Medvedev brothers in "The Unknown Stalin," 2003, p. 74:

>Marshal Zhukov, who commanded the Soviet occupation troops in 1945-46, could not resist the general passion for removing and appropriating German trophies. On Stalin's personal orders, agents of the MGB carried out a secret search of Zhukov's apartment and dacha and discovered not only a considerable number of souvenirs (carpets, furs, gold watches and other 'trifles') but also '55 valuable classical paintings in handsome frames'; some of which, it turned out, 'had been taken from Potsdam and other palaces and houses in Germany'.

After Stalin's death Zhukov was elevated under Khrushchev, and reciprocated by threatening a military coup if the so-called "Anti-Party Group" headed by Molotov refused to back down from their effort at peacefully removing Khrushchev in 1957. A few months later Khrushchev himself removed Zhukov, fearful of any possible ambitions he might have and also because Khrushchev was now firmly in control of matters.

If I recall right Zhukov's memoirs of WWII, published in the 1970s, were fairly well-disposed towards Stalin as a military leader. In particular he considered utterly baseless the claim made by Khrushchev in his "Secret Speech" that Stalin planned operations using a globe of the earth since he was too dumb to do anything else.

>>2773

Correct. I have read Ian Grey's "Stalin: Man of History" and Geoffrey Roberts' "Stalin's Wars" though. The former is a good overall biography with a lot of information on Stalin during the Civil War and WWII, the latter does a good job describing him during WWII, the Korean War and such.

>>2828

>Are there any other Soviet politicians or thinkers from the Stalin era worthy of serious investigation?

Vyshinsky: https://archive.org/details/lawofthesovietst008593mbp

Zhdanov: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1ZP6ZurgOg-LXBnTGluZ2dQeEE/view?usp=drive_web

To my knowledge Molotov, Kaganovich and most other Soviet politicians didn't write any theoretical stuff of note. Vyshinsky was basically the leader of Soviet jurisprudence and Zhdanov the leader of Soviet philosophy and culture so they had to write about such subjects.

But when it comes to Soviet-era academic journals there's very little that has been translated. Here's a random example of one economic article that has been: http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv13n1/smolin.htm

>>2862

>Did anything remarkable happen under Stalin in the post-WW2 period?

Most of 1945-1953 was spent rebuilding from the destruction caused by the war. There was an ambitious "Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature" (which one source describes as "the world's first explicit attempt to reverse human-induced climate change") and various debates on the transition from socialism to communism, but no really major changes in policy as far as I know. Most works on the Soviet economy tend to treat Stalin's last years as an afterthought.

As for living standards, I linked to this a few posts back but here it is again: http://bookzz.org/book/813582/c9432b

>What was Stalin's stance on Eastern Europe

That they were People's Democracies, meaning they were a particular form of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

>Were the countries "Satelite states" under Stalin or were they more than nominally independent?

"Satellite states" is a vague term. Can you elaborate? Like what does "independent" mean in this case? They were sovereign countries with foreign policies based on proletarian internationalism, anti-imperialism and friendship with the USSR.

>>2864

If you mean did Stalin say "alright Czechoslovak comrades, I order you to take power now" or "comrades of Poland, you should collectivize by this date" then no. Each country in Eastern Europe pursued its own policies: some had multi-party systems, others didn't. Albania didn't collectivize its agriculture until the late 50s. Constitutional structures were also different; some countries had Presidencies whereas others didn't, etc.

The USSR did exercise influence insofar as it was the model upon which all the Eastern European countries based their own economic, political and social policies on. Soviet theoretical journals and the opinions of the CPSU's leadership were also taken seriously. But the Soviets didn't remote-control the Eastern European countries.

>>2868

Yes, after Stalin's death Comecon and the Warsaw Treaty Organization (which was formed in 1955) were used as instruments by the Soviet revisionists, who restored capitalism in the USSR, to exploit the economies of Eastern Europe. Against Stalin's policy of industrial development the revisionists proclaimed an "international socialist division of labor" wherein Albania (for example) would cease building industry in favor of becoming the USSR's "orchard garden" which would export agricultural produce to the Soviets.

>>2899

He didn't.

There was a famine in the Ukraine, but there were also severe food shortages elsewhere in the USSR at the same time. The famine took the Soviet leadership by surprise, as is obvious from looking at recently-declassified letters in the archives (for examples see: http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1588783&postcount=38)

For a good read explaining why the Soviet government acted as it did, see: http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=h-russia&month=0205&week=a&msg=G9gRj0I/eXnblGCPQyYXlA&user=&pw

>>2904

Stalin argued in favor of retaining the machine-tractor stations in his work "Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R.," whereas Khrushchev abolished them. The MTS were portrayed under Stalin as being of great importance to socialism in the countryside. Khrushchev by contrast claimed that it was only Stalin's supposed "distrust" of the peasantry that prevented the MTS from being disbanded earlier.

As for the transfomration of certain collective farms into state farms, if I recall right many of those that were transformed were performing poorly to begin with. It was more an issue of keeping them afloat rather than causing them to collapse altogether. This is obviously the opposite of the intention of Lenin and Stalin: to raise productive collective farms into even more productive state farms once the material conditions made it possible.

>>2910

>If I recall correctly, he wasn't arguing in favor of MTS, he just mentioned that most collective farms use them (and some can't afford tractors anyway), and urged them to scrape some money together and get their own fucking tractors instead.

That was actually Khrushchev's position, and a bunch of Soviet economists at the time argued against dissolving the MTS precisely because it would cause the peasants to incur unpayable debts (as did indeed occur.)

This is Stalin's position, which clearly stands in contrast to Khrushchev's view:

>What, in view of this, would be the effect of selling the machine and tractor stations to the collective farms as their property? The effect would be to involve the collective farms in heavy loss and to ruin them, to undermine the mechanization of agriculture, and to slow up the development of collective-farm production.

>The conclusion therefore is that, in proposing that the machine and tractor stations should be sold to the collective farms as their property, Comrades Sanina and Venzher are suggesting a step in reversion to the old backwardness and are trying to turn back the wheel of history.

>Assuming for a moment that we accepted Comrades Sanina's and Venzher's proposal and began to sell the basic implements of production, the machine and tractor stations, to the collective farms as their property. What would be the outcome?

>The outcome would be, first, that the collective farms would become the owners of the basic instruments of production; that is, their status would be an exceptional one, such as is not shared by any other enterprise in our country, for, as we know, even the nationalized enterprises do not own their instruments of production. How, by what considerations of progress and advancement, could this exceptional status of the collective farms be justified? Can it be said that such a status would facilitate the elevation of collective-farm property to the level of public property, that it would expedite the transition of our society from socialism to communism? Would it not be truer to say that such a status could only dig a deeper gulf between collective-farm property and public property, and would not bring us any nearer to communism, but, on the contrary, remove us farther from it?

>The outcome would be, secondly, an extension of the sphere of operation of commodity circulation, because a gigantic quantity of instruments of agricultural production would come within its orbit. What do Comrades Sanina and Venzher think — is the extension of the sphere of commodity circulation calculated to promote our advance towards communism? Would it not be truer to say that our advance towards communism would only be retarded by it?

>Comrades Sanina's and Venzher's basic error lies in the fact that they do not understand the role and significance of commodity circulation under socialism; that they do not understand that commodity circulation is incompatible with the prospective transition from socialism to communism. They evidently think that the transition from socialism to communism is possible even with commodity circulation, that commodity circulation can be no obstacle to this. That is a profound error, arising from an inadequate grasp of Marxism.

>but I do know that Khrushchev was cracking down hard on private cooperation, unlike the Stalin, who was either leaving it alone, or (according to some sources) was actually supportive of it.

No he wasn't. As one source notes, even when Stalin was alive Khrushchev was proposing right-wing economic measures. "The proposal advocated by Khrushchev in the post-war period encouraging the collective farms to construct auxiliary enterprises for the manufacture of bricks, tiles and other items also implied the existence of means of production outside the state sector and instead centred on the co-operative property of the collective farms. This measure was correctly criticised by Malenkov in 1952 (G. Malenkov, 'Report to the 19th Congress on the Work of the C.C. of the CPSU (B)', Moscow, 1952, pp. 75-76.)"

Khrushchev's positions on agriculture mirroed his right-wing positions elsewhere, typified by rehabilitating revisionist economists like Voznesensky and Varga.

Stalin's book "Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R." was actually privately denounced as "left-deviationist" shortly after his death, and his advocacy of introducing products-exchange in the Soviet countryside was likewise attacked shortly after his death (Stalin himself was not explicitly named until 1956, but everyone was aware who was the real target of the criticisms.)

>>2912

Obviously the Soviet revisionists in the 1950s-70s didn't want certain sectors of the economy to grow to such an extent that they threatened the new state-capitalist order the revisionists were establishing. Under Khrushchev and his successors, regardless of occasional "crackdowns" on especially blatant cases of corruption and a few other measures meant to show how "socialist" the revisionists were, the political and economic life of the USSR was clearly oriented towards the liquidation of socialism in practice after 1953.

Three example articles, which focus on the changes brought about by the revisionists in the 1950s in both theory and actual policy:

* http://revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv2n1/20inter.htm

* http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv4n2/polecon.htm

* http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv1n1/marksoc.htm

>>2915

The problem is that you're equating socialism with state ownership, which is a basic error. Using that logic one could argue that modern-day China is "socialist" because it still retains a significant, if not leading, state sector in the national economy.

After 1953 the state enterprises themselves were gradually run on a capitalist basis. The means of production became commodities, as did labor-power. Profit was judged to be the supreme criteria of an enterprise's success. A new bourgeoisie came into being.

A great read on this subject, because it relies almost entirely on the revealing words of Soviet revisionist sources, is Bill Bland's work: http://www.oneparty.co.uk/html/book/ussrmenu.html

If you want to look at whether capitalism reigned in the USSR or not, it doesn't make much sense to look at independent artisans in the cities and towns. Obviously as Lenin said such small-scale production engenders capitalism, but compared to socialist industry (as well as producer and consumer cooperatives) it was insignificant.

There's always room for more questions 'bout Stalin.

>>2946

It was not a feud on Stalin's part. Trotsky had been anti-Bolshevik from the inception of the Bolshevik faction of the RSDLP to the middle of 1917 when, seeing the successes of the Bolsheviks, he decided to join them. He was criticized under Lenin a number of times, but it was when Lenin was dying that Trotsky began angling to be his successor and reviving his pre-1917 positions, denigrating Stalin the same way he denigrated Lenin. The Trotskyists refused to adhere to democratic centralism and were gradually defeated through 1924-1928 by means of open debates between the followers of the line of the Party (headed by Stalin) and Trotsky's followers.

"Congress XV opened on December 2, 1927, with 898 delegates chosen by 887,000 members. In the voting, delegates representing 724,000 members supported the Central Committee. The Opposition received the vote of delegates speaking for only 4,000 members, with the balance abstaining... In January, 1928, Trotsky was exiled to Alma Ata in Turkestan. Here he hunted, fished, lived comfortably, despite attacks of colitis, gout and malaria, and carried on an extensive correspondence with little interference. Between April and October, by his own account, he sent out 800 political letters, 'among them quite a few large works,' and 550 telegrams, and received 1,000 political letters and 700 telegrams. He also carried on 'secret' correspondence by courier. On December 16, 1928, an agent of the GPU arrived from Moscow with the demand that he cease his leadership of the Opposition. He refused in a long letter to the Central Committee and the Presidium of the Comintern. Stalin's supporters, he said, were 'creatively impotent, false, contradictory, unreliable, blind, cowardly, inept' and were 'executing the orders of the enemy classes. . . . The great historical strength of the Opposition, in spite of its apparent weakness, lies in the fact that it keeps its fingers on the pulse of the world historical process. . . . To abstain from political activity would mean to obtain from getting ready for tomorrow.'" (Schuman, Soviet Politics at Home and Abroad, 1946, pp. 205-206.) Consequently, he was expelled from the USSR.

During the 1930s Trotsky continued opposing Soviet power, including resorting to assassinations, sabotage and alliance with foreign powers. Trotsky meanwhile was making increasingly hysterical claims against the "Stalinist bureaucracy," comparing it to Nazism, claiming that Stalin poisoned Lenin, etc.

>>2950

When Trotsky and his followers called for "super-industrialization" and the struggle against the kulak it was a demagogic measure. Neither industry or agriculture had recovered to their prewar levels.

Furthermore, to quote a bourgeois economist not at all inclined towards Stalin:

"It is true that Trotsky's later writings could be quoted to support [policies traditionally associated with him in opposition to Stalin], but it runs totally counter to what Trotsky said and wrote at the time, that is, in the whole period 1921-5, before his expulsion from the leadership... when he spoke to the Fourth Congress of the Communist International in 1922 he emphasized the need for a long transition period in which there would have to be recourse to capitalist methods of calculation. Indeed, he said the following:

'in the course of the transitional epoch each enterprise and each set of enterprises must to a greater or lesser degree orient itself independently in the market and test itself through the market... which will remain the regulator of the state economy for a long time to come.'

We shall see that this was quite consistent with what he wrote on the same subject ten years later. So it may be in certain respects that Trotsky was not at one with Preobrazhensky, who did indeed see the plan and market as irreconcilable opposites (which is not to say that Trotsky liked the market). This might help to explain the fact that Preobrazhensky broke with Trotsky when Stalin made his left turn in 1928.

Trotsky had made the economic report on behalf of the Politbureau to the Twelfth Party Congress in 1923... he saw the necessity for stimulating peasant agriculture, and he quite specifically asserted that it is necessary that 'the peasant should become richer'. This is not very different from Bukharin's slogan of 1925, that the peasants should 'get rich'. Trotsky was also against taxing the kulak too heavily... As for planning, one has only to read Trotsky's writings of the period to see that he did not regard it as the antithesis of the market... In his important pamphlet The New Course, written in 1923 and published in the following years, this is stated with even greater emphasis. Admitting that the existence of the market 'extraordinarily complicates' the task of planning, he went on:

'for the next period we shall have a planned economy allying itself more and more with the market and, as a result, adapting itself to the market in the course of its growth... we must adapt Soviet industry to the peasant market on the one hand and the taxable capacity of the peasant on the other... Only in this way shall we be able to avoid destroying the equilibrium of our Soviet state until the revolution will have destroyed the equilibrium of the capitalist states... What is needed is the effective adaptation of industry to the rural economy... The correct work of our state planning commission is the direct and rational way of approaching successfully the solution of the questions relating to the smyčka [alliance of workers and poor peasants] - not by suppressing the market but on the basis of the market.' ...

It seems to me that Trotsky in the period 1921-5 did not have an economic policy prescription very different from that of Bukharin. In the words of Stephen Cohen, Trotsky was a kind of NEPist."

(Nove, Alec. Socialism, Economics and Development. New York: Routledge. 1986. pp. 88-90.)

After Stalin actually carried out industrialization and collectivization (at a time when both industry and agriculture had been restored to prewar levels), Trotsky wrote a pamphlet called "The Soviet Economy in Danger" which called for a "controlled return" of the kulaks and other right-wing measures to avert what was supposedly a crisis situation in the country. Then in the mid-30s, when it was very obvious the Soviet economy wasn't "in danger," he gave himself credit in "The Revolution Betrayed" for the fact that industry and collectives had been set up, albeit damning the "Stalinist bureaucracy" for the inevitable errors and excesses he would have somehow avoided.

His advocacy of "left" measures in the mid-late 20s was little more than posturing himself as a "radical" up against the "conservative bureaucracy" which was supposedly afraid of confronting the kulaks. This was attractive to his mostly student following.

Any other questions?

>>3001

Bordiga's "explanation" for why the USSR was capitalist pretty much boiled down to "because it was in a world where it had to trade with capitalist states, ergo capitalist." Even Cliffites make more effort when trying to "explain" how the USSR under Stalin was supposedly state-capitalist.

Anyway, the USSR was socialist because the economy was consciously planned by society. Profit and the law of value were subordinated to production for social needs. The reserve army of labor (i.e. unemployment), inherent in capitalism, was abolished. Money was used by planners for accounting purposes. The principle "from each according to his ability, to each according to his work" was implemented.

One major area Stalin focused on in his last years was the Soviet countryside. He wanted to replace commodity-money relations there with what was called products-exchange, see: http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv13n1/smolin.htm

This was promptly denounced as "left-deviationist" after his death.

>>3004

It should be worth a read even with the lame analysis, simply because Volkogonov had access to just about every single archive when it came to writing his biographies.

It was his first biography and initially published during the Gorbachev period though, so I think the terrible politics will be more restrained and not openly anti-communist, but it obviously aims to denigrate Stalin just like his Lenin bio aimed to denigrate Lenin.

If you ever do read it, you should post any questions you have on here.

>>3006

I really can't answer the question of whom I prefer on a military level, but from a political standpoint Rokossovsky was attacked by Gomułka as part of his nationalist "Polish road to socialism," whereas Zhukov threatened a military coup if the "Anti-Party Group" didn't reverse their effort to remove Khrushchev.

It seems that he was purely a military man, or at least less political than Zhukov (who wasn't all that political to begin with.) I think both men were basically good. Zhukov's had a falling out with Khrushchev and in his memoir debunked some of the revisionist denigration of Stalin's role during the Great Patriotic War.

I'm still here, ready to answer questions.

>>3023

Actually steps were made towards what were termed communist construction in Stalin's last years, see: http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv3n1/gosplan.htm

One of the main aspects of Stalin's work "Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R." was the need to replace commodity relations in the countryside with products-exchange: http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv13n1/smolin.htm

As for "a decline towards Democracy," can you elaborate?

>>3039

The source that Trotsky was lied to about the date of Lenin's funeral comes solely from Trotsky himself. As Ian Grey notes in his biography of Stalin (p. 488), Trotsky "alleged that he was told on January 22 that the funeral would be on January 26, when it was actually to be held on January 27. Even if his statement was true and he believed that the funeral would be on the earlier date, he could still have reached Moscow in time by train."

Bukharin was executed based on his testimony, and the testimony of many others, that he was involved in plots to overthrow the Soviet government and Party leadership. He already spoke of the possibility of assassinating Stalin with his supporters at an earlier date, see: http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv8n1/bukharin.htm

As for bureaucracy, Stalin struggled against it. See Getty's "Origins of the Great Purges": http://bookzz.org/book/989260/2309c7

>>3047

Pretty sure that was another example where the only source is Trotsky.

>>3049

Zinoviev and Kamenev were opportunists. They were against Trotsky because the latter was posing as Lenin's heir whereas Zinoviev wanted to pose as Lenin's heir. Later Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev allied against Stalin because Stalin represented the majority of the Bolshevik Party.

Stalin has a terrible reputation because he played a leading role in Soviet affairs for decades, so naturally the terrible reputation of the Soviets, which began with allegations in the Western press as early as 1917-19 that the Bolsheviks were collectivizing women and were literal mad men escaped from asylums, would rub off on him as well. The issue is whether allegations against him and the USSR are true or not, not what silly claims are made against him and the country and party he led.

>>3051

"Congress XV opened on December 2, 1927, with 898 delegates chosen by 887,000 members. In the voting, delegates representing 724,000 members supported the Central Committee. The Opposition received the vote of delegates speaking for only 4,000 members, with the balance abstaining... In January, 1928, Trotsky was exiled to Alma Ata in Turkestan. Here he hunted, fished, lived comfortably, despite attacks of colitis, gout and malaria, and carried on an extensive correspondence with little interference. Between April and October, by his own account, he sent out 800 political letters, 'among them quite a few large works,' and 550 telegrams, and received 1,000 political letters and 700 telegrams. He also carried on 'secret' correspondence by courier. On December 16, 1928, an agent of the GPU arrived from Moscow with the demand that he cease his leadership of the Opposition. He refused in a long letter to the Central Committee and the Presidium of the Comintern. Stalin's supporters, he said, were 'creatively impotent, false, contradictory, unreliable, blind, cowardly, inept' and were 'executing the orders of the enemy classes. . . . The great historical strength of the Opposition, in spite of its apparent weakness, lies in the fact that it keeps its fingers on the pulse of the world historical process. . . . To abstain from political activity would mean to obtain from getting ready for tomorrow.'" (Schuman, Soviet Politics at Home and Abroad, 1946, pp. 205-206.)

Besides this he had also formed an underground printing press, among other things. So he was exiled from the USSR.

I didn't make the board, but it was clearly meant as a board for Marxist-Leninists and those with questions for MLs to answer, as distinct from /leftypol/ which is basically "anyone who considers themselves a leftist can post here."

>On what basis do reformists claim Stalin purged every original central committee member, and if it is true why?

What is meant by "original central committee"? Virtually every political organization has people who were involved in it and then later either left or were expelled from it. Lenin wasn't even present at the First Congress of the RSDLP (albeit because he had been arrested beforehand), and in fact none of the nine delegates ever went on to play a significant role in the RSDLP or Bolsheviks afterward. It's silly to think that because someone was involved in something at a particular time, this means that ten, twenty or thirty years later they must have the same politics or be faultless revolutionaries.

>What do you think of the book revolution betrayed?

Its arguments are effective to political newbies.

>what are your thoughts on Yugoslavia after they left the Comintern?

You mean Cominform, which they were expelled from. My thoughts are that Yugoslavia became a neo-colony of the West and pursued a viciously anti-communist foreign policy with "Marxist" phraseology.

>How did hruschev come to power? wasn't Molotov supposed to be the supreme soviet?

The Supreme Soviet was the name of legislature, not a position. When Stalin died his "heir" (he never actually named a heir nor wanted to do so) was Malenkov. Besides him were Beria, Khrushchev and Molotov. Beria was killed by the end of the year, Malenkov was sidelined, and Molotov and others were later forced out of the Politburo by Khrushchev who threatened a military coup if he was voted out of his position.

>How did Trotsky attract such a cult of personality when he was politically anx economically illiterate, and overall thought to be pompous by committee members?

He was an exceptional orator, and it was precisely through his "acting" skills that he was able to make an impression on pretty much everyone.

>did his '4th international’ have any significant influence?

In a few places, like Bolivia and Ceylon, but for the most part no and only after he died. In Spain for example the "official" Trotskyists, affiliated to Trotsky's international, were a tiny group, whereas the POUM was much larger and actually important.

>why did hruschev give back northern Iran?

He didn't, you're thinking of Stalin. It's been a while since I read about it, but basically the USSR and UK sent troops into Iran and deposed the pro-Nazi shah, and after the war ended progressive Kurdish and Azeri figures wanted to set up their own republics. The Soviets weren't against this, but didn't exactly welcome the prospect of a hostile Iran and UK over the issue of north-western Iran. As neither the Kurdish nor Azeri autonomous regions were able to maintain themselves, they were reintegrated back into Iran when the Soviets withdrew, which they did on the basis of an agreement with Iran.

>was there ever a time when the Komsomol wasn't corrupt?

I don't recall Komsomol being particularly corrupt under Lenin and Stalin. There were many careerists I'm sure, since most of those who became members of the Party after the revolution did so after spending years in the Komsomol.

>what was trotskies function in the party?

He was in the Central Committee and Politburo. In other words, he was in the leadership alongside Stalin and others.

>what would have happened if operation unthinkable went trough?

I'm the wrong guy to ask military questions.

>why have Lenin's critics of Trotsky been so hushed up?

Trotskyists claim that they're "irrelevant" because he made most of them before 1917. Their significance, though, isn't that he made them in 1913 or whatever (he was criticizing Trotsky as late as April-May 1917 and also continued to criticize him, obviously in different ways, after he joined the Bolsheviks) but that the criticisms Lenin made of Trotsky's character, of his sometimes sectarian and sometimes opportunist antics, of his tendency to gossip, to grandstand, etc., clearly did not disappear as soon as Trotsky joined the Bolshevik Party.

>was homosexuality banned in interests of natality?

You mean in the interest of increasing the population? No. The NKVD was reporting a rise in pederasty within the USSR, while many leftists abroad were reporting on the existence of homosexuals within the Nazi Party and the idea that homosexuality was basically a manifestation of misogyny. For that reason, male homosexual acts were made a criminal offense. See also: http://www.stalinsociety.org/2015/04/08/homosexuality-in-the-ussr/

>on what basis do people call Stalin a Russian nationalist, when he was Georgian?

He had to deal with a number of national-deviationists in the 1920s, particularly in Georgia, and in the 1930s and 40s there were changes in Soviet historiography which got rid of the one-sided view of some aspects of Russian history. There's some other allegations too, mainly having to do with Soviet foreign policy, but a lot of it is just based on misunderstandings of why the Soviets did what they did.

>>3056

Chávez had good intentions, but as he said in one interview: "I don't believe in the dogmatic postulates of Marxist revolution. I don't accept that we are living in a period of proletarian revolutions. All that must be revised. Reality is telling us that every day. Are we aiming in Venezuela today for the abolition of private property or a classless society? I don't think so."

Cuba did not have a proletarian revolution, but like Venezuela its leadership did carry out progressive reforms in the interest of the working people. The difference was that Cuba also became used as a pawn for Soviet social-imperialism abroad. See: http://www.bannedthought.net/Cuba-Che/Cuba/ForeignCriticism/Cuba-EvaporationOfAMyth-RCP-1977.pdf

The DPRK, when Stalin was alive, was building socialism. After Stalin's death Kim Il Sung pulled the "Juche idea" out of his ass and Korean historiography was rewritten so that Kim was portrayed as the founder of the first "real" communist group in Korea in 1926, at the age of 14, and that he always opposed the Comintern's supposed "dogmatism" and whatnot. Juche is anti-Marxist. The DPRK is not socialist. This does not mean that it is some sort of techno-feudal super-fascist hell or whatever fake categories people invent for it because they buy into Western propaganda portraying it as worse than Nazi Germany.

Belarus is a capitalist state. There's not much good that can be said about it.

For medicine in the USSR under Stalin, see:

* https://www.marxists.org/archive/newsholme/1933/red-medicine/red-medicine.pdf

* http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b4289355;view=1up;seq=9

What do you mean by "sects"? Do you mean factions? Factions were outlawed under Lenin. The Trots and Right Opposition were defeated by the end of the 20s, after that there weren't really any factions in the party, at least not ones capable of actually illegally organizing as factions.

The puges uncovered traitorous elements in the armed forces, and ultimately played a positive role in Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War.

There have been many progressive movements throughout history. Marx himself spoke of utopian socialists like Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen. Their failings were precisely because they subordinated science to idealism, were reformists instead of revolutionaries, and did not fully grasp the historic role of the working-class nor the role of the bourgeoisie and other classes in relation to both.

Not to mention that such forces do not fully understand (in fact many would oppose) the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat. They would have an incorrect understanding of socialism and of many other things.

>>3059

Stalin was among the Bolshevik delegates to the Constituent Assembly and fully supported the efforts of Lenin and Sverdlov to demand that it recognize soviet power. When the counter-revolutionary majority of the CA refused to do so, the Bolsheviks and Left SRs walked out.

It wasn't an anti-democratic action at all. The CA was not a representative institution. The election lists were drawn up before the split in the SR party, which confused the peasants.

Furthermore, "The Bolsheviks took Petrograd and Moscow, and probably won in urban Russia as a whole... The SRs' overall victory was the result of winning the peasant vote in the villages. But there was a certain ambiguity in this. The peasants were probably single-issue voters, and the SR and Bolshevik programmes on the land were virtually identical. The SRs, however, were much better known to the peasantry, their traditional constituency. Where the peasants knew the Bolshevik programme (usually as a result of proximity to towns, garrisons, or railways, where the Bolsheviks had done more campaigning), their votes were split between the Bolsheviks and the SRs." (Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, 2008, pp. 66-67.)

The Right-SRs promised land reform in words, but didn't want to carry it out in deeds. This was shown later during the Civil War. As for the CA itself, the workers and peasants did not care that it was disbanded. The Third Soviet Congress which met afterward was actually representative of their interests, and they knew this.

>>3061

The CA represented bourgeois democracy, the soviets represented proletarian democracy.

The Mensheviks, Right-SRs, and obviously the Kadets and whatnot were partisans of bourgeois democracy.

The Bolsheviks were the most consistent supporters of proletarian democracy, and thus called on the CA to recognize soviet power, which it refused to do.

The SRs and Mensheviks lost any real popular support by the end of the Civil War. That they were stabbed in the back by the avowed monarchists and other ultra-reactionary forces whom they allied with is not an indictment of Bolshevism.

>>3063

>The Soviets failed because they tried to buck Marx's theory. Bourgeois democracy, according to Marx, is necessary in the short term.

Nowhere did Marx say this. He recognized bourgeois democracy as an advance against absolutism and whatnot (as did Lenin), but at no point did he say that a country could not move from an absolutist monarchy or bourgeois dictatorship to a proletarian dictatorship without a period of bourgeois democracy in between.

>but the RSRs are best described as Dem. Socs. they wanted socialism without the dictatorship part.

There is no such thing as "democratic socialism" except as a way to deceive workers, the same thing with religious or national "socialism." The SRs were a petty-bourgeois party which based itself on the desire of the peasants for the destruction of the landowners. Its "socialism" was anti-Marxist, based on the Narodniki doctrine that industrial development in Russia was an aberration rather than historically progressive.

>True but many probably feared that the Bolsheviks wouldn't allow it to remeet if it accepted the limitations. It'd be more correct to say that fear of the bolsheviks prevented this.

They were afraid of the Bolsheviks and their resolution on soviet power presented to the CA because it meant subordinating the CA to the power of the workers, peasants and soldiers as expressed through the Soviet Congress. It is not surprising that bourgeois parliamentarians and renegades from the socialist movement would abhor this situation.

>>3067

>Besides, only a worldwide revolution could maintain any revolution.

Except that's wrong. The USSR didn't fail because there wasn't a worldwide revolution.

>I would argue that any pro-democratic socialist ideology is dem. socialism. I'd even venture to say that anarchist ideologies - ie syndicalism - are by that dem. socialist.

Socialism as a term, when used by Marxists, is by its nature is democratic, just like it is scientific and revolutionary.

>I'd even venture to say that anarchist ideologies - ie syndicalism - are by that dem. socialist.

Except anarchism and syndicalism aren't socialism.

>I think that Lenin's aggressiveness scared them more than anyone.

Do you have any evidence for this whatsoever?

>>3069

>I am going to guess that you would say it was because of stagnation and it drifting away from socialism, no?

The stagnation came as a result of the economic policies pursued by the Soviet revisionists following Stalin's death, which amounted to a restoration of capitalism in the country.

>Communists though. Certainly communists.

No, certainly not. Marxism and Anarchism are distinct. The writings of Proudhon, Stirner, Bakunin, Kropotkin, etc. differ in many ways from those of Marx and Engels.

>>3072

Why wouldn't I be? As Lenin and Stalin noted, the USSR of the 1920s was not yet socialist. It had the task of reviving an economy which had been ruined by a world imperialist war and then a civil war.

As it was put in the Short Course history of the CPSU(B):

>In his speech, Lenin said that freedom of trade would at first lead to a certain revival of capitalism in the country. It would be necessary to permit private trade and to allow private manufacturers to open small businesses. But no fears need be entertained on this score. Lenin considered that a certain freedom of trade would give the peasant an economic incentive, induce him to produce more and would lead to a rapid improvement of agriculture; that, on this basis, the state-owned industries would be restored and private capital displaced; that strength and resources having been accumulated, a powerful industry could be created as the economic foundation of Socialism, and that then a determined offensive could be undertaken to destroy the remnants of capitalism in the country.

>War Communism had been an attempt to take the fortress of the capitalist elements in town and countryside by assault, by a frontal attack. In this offensive the Party had gone too far ahead, and ran the risk of being cut off from its base. Now Lenin proposed to retire a little, to retreat for a while nearer to the base, to change from an assault of the fortress to the slower method of siege, so as to gather strength and resume the offensive.

>The Trotskyites and other oppositionists held that NEP was nothing but a retreat. This interpretation suited their purpose, for their line was to restore capitalism. This was a most harmful, anti-Leninist interpretation of NEP. The fact is that only a year after NEP was introduced Lenin declared at the Eleventh Party Congress that the retreat had come to an end, and he put forward the slogan: "Prepare for an offensive on private capital."

>>3075

Yes, as a transitional measure carried out by the proletarian state in order to make it possible to build socialism.

>>3077

Homosexuality was viewed in the USSR as either the equivalent to pedophilia, a symbol of patriarchical relations, and/or an example of the decadence of class societies. See: http://www.stalinsociety.org/2015/04/08/homosexuality-in-the-ussr/

As for transsexuals, the concept didn't exist in Stalin's day (at least not on any notable level) so he couldn't have had an opinion of them. I don't think sex-change operations were carried out after the 20s though.

>>3082

>So would you agree with Stalin's view on homosexuality?

No, his views on the subject reflected the era he lived in.

>regardless what is the Stalinist - if such a thing exists- consenus

There isn't one. It's not like Stalin's writings abounded with talk on sexual orientation or transsexuals (neither did Lenin's, Engels' or Marx's.)

>>3087

>looking at the world historically, will there be a successful proletarian revolution any time soon? One that can defend against foreign imperialists?

I can't answer that question. I do think that socialism is becoming more acceptable to the mass of people in various countries though. The problem is that currently "socialism," as they see it, is filtered through the likes of Bernie Sanders, Syriza, and other right-wing and reformist illusions.

>what are some good books to start with If I want to learn Marxism leninism?

The Short Course is good for both the basics of Leninism as well as the history of the Bolsheviks (and Russia and the USSR) up to 1938: https://archive.org/details/ShortCourseHistoryCPSUBolsheviks

Stalin's "Foundations of Leninism" is an excellent text explicitly meant for Marxist newbies.

>what was the soviet stance on gun control, during and after Stalin?

I haven't studied the issue, but to my knowledge hunting weapons were largely the only ones allowed in the cities. In the peasant countryside it seemed guns were a lot more common though.

>>3093

It's worth noting a few things about Lysenko.

In the first place, he was never a member of the CPSU. His appeals were initially couched in patriotic terminology and his knowledge of Marxism was scant.

Second, he was actually associated with Khrushchev (which isn't surprising as both were from the Ukraine.) It wasn't until after Khrushchev's ouster that Lysenko was deprived of all influence.

As for Stalin's opinion of Lysenko, as one source notes:

>In 1940, Lysenko became Director of the Institute of Genetics within the USSR Academy of Sciences, where he used his political influence and power to dismiss Mendelian genetics as “bourgeois science” and “pseudoscience”. Yet, even Stalin was not convinced of Lysenko's scientific and political claims. Stalin removed all mention of “bourgeois biology” from Lysenko's report, The State of Biology in the Soviet Union, and in the margin next to the statement that “any science is based on class” Stalin wrote, “Ha-ha-ha!! And what about mathematics? Or Darwinism?”

Lysenko had many flawed theories and was not a good scientist. He posed as the underdog and complained that his colleagues were all jealous of his scientific findings and trying to suppress them. His efforts were also conducted at a time when DNA wasn't really known all that well yet; the double-helix was discovered a month before Stalin died.

>>3102

State capitalism, in the sense Lenin and Stalin used it, actually failed to develop much despite active efforts by the Bolsheviks to promote it. According to the Soviet revisionists in the 1970s "Great Soviet Encyclopedia," "The Russian bourgeoisie would not accept state capitalism and was therefore forcibly expropriated. By 1923–24 the share of state-capitalist enterprises in the gross output of the national economy was only 0.1 percent, and the number of persons they employed at the end of 1925 did not exceed 1 percent of the country’s workers."

Obviously that's distinct from the NEP. which remained operative throughout the 20s and which was focused on commercial activity and the countryside rather than industry per se.

Anyway, socialism began when collectivization and industrialization were carried out along with the end of the NEPmen in the cities and the establishment of national economic planning. In other words, the socialized economy accounted for basically everything significant in terms of production and distribution within the country. Socialism was said to have been built in the USSR by the mid-30s as a result of this, hence the 1936 Stalin Constitution.

Any more questions?

>>3121

>Did he really see Russians as the foremost nationality in detriment of others?

No. He pointed out that the Russians played the most outstanding role during the Great Patriotic War, as is obvious. He never proclaimed Russians some sort of nation "above" others.

>Was his line really chauvinistic and wrong? Like what Lenin said during the georgian affair.

Lenin originally sided with Ordzhonikidze, Dzerzhinsky and Stalin in the "Georgian Affair." Later, when he was bedridden and Krupskaya the major source and "filter" for information, he turned against them on the basis of what she filtered through to him from the national-deviationists. See: http://ml-review.ca/aml/CommunistLeague/TESTAMENT.HTM

>What can you say about the question of nationalities under Stalin

Quite a bit. What do you want to know?

>>3124

Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were to varying extents pro-German by the time the Soviets sent in troops. At first the Soviets were only interested in them not entering any formal military arrangements with Nazi Germany and had no interest in changing their societies. But their continued pro-German positions, and the fact that there were many elements in said societies advocating for social change, persuaded the Soviets to intervene.

What occurred was an essentially indigenous revolution in all three states, protected by the presence of the Red Army. Communists were released from prisons and coalition governments were set up. Anna Louise Strong wrote a book of her impressions of the revolution in Lithuania: http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89017381948;view=1up;seq=5

It's also important to remember that all three states had revolutions in 1917-1918 as well, which were only suppressed by the armed intervention of the imperialists and their allies. Latvia in particular produced many important Bolsheviks and cadres of the Red Army. A pamphlet on this subject: https://archive.org/details/SovietRussiaAndTheBalticRepublics

>>3139

Prostitution was seen as a result of unemployment and poverty. Under Tsarism it was one of the few ways in which women could move to urban areas to even begin to find normal employment.

Socialists regarded prostitution as exploitative; pimps were prosecuted. The end of prostitution was linked to resolving unemployment and poverty. As unemployment came to an end after 1930, prostitution rapidly faded.

>>3148

>I'm curious about why people choose to believe it so radically

Because they're taught that Marxism = mass murder. Stalin was a leading Marxist figure, ergo Stalin being a mass murderer isn't hard to believe.

>and what one could say to people who hold this belief to convince them that it's simply not true.

Simply explain the policies he carried out, and why people died in the course of said policies.

>Furthermore, would you have any books/texts/sources to maybe prove that Stalin did not commit what modern society claims he did?

Yes, I'm pretty sure I've mentioned some of them in this thread.

>Overall, how much would you say that the hate for Stalin is down to how heavily propagandised his actions are? Or do you perhaps think that it were his genuine, factual actions that drive so much hate?

Depends on who is doing the hating. A worker and a capitalist can both be taken in by the "common sense" demonization of Stalin, but it is the capitalist whose interests are actually threatened by this demonized portrait being challenged.

There's also attempts to sugarcoat the reactionary forces in Soviet and Tsarist-era society. Kulaks were merely "hard-working peasants," the Orthodox Church was just a bunch of old guys with silly hats and long beards, the royal family were all whimsical fairy tale people who the Bolsheviks shot in cold blood because the Bolsheviks were evil, etc. If you take all this as a given, then naturally Stalin's actions appear bad from the get-go.

>>3150

Collectivization was clearly a success insofar as basically all Soviet agriculture was either collectivized or state farms by 1939. The mechanization which came with collective farming also meant higher the threat of famine would never recur (with the exception of 1945-46 which was associated with the Nazi destruction of the Ukraine and Byelorussia and doesn't count.)

>And why would so many people have resisted and actively acted against collectivisation?

Kulaks were the exploiters of the countryside, so they had a material interest in doing so. As for other peasants, there were a bunch of reasons, largely related to not understanding what collectivization actually entailed. The kulaks spread rumors that it meant a return to War Communism, that all property would be confiscated, etc.

In some places, like Turkmenia, there were rumors that not just agriculture but also women would be collectivized. Kulaks also threatened peasants to oppose collectivization.

But on the whole, collectivization was carried out in a grassroots way. Two good reads on the subject:

* http://www.plp.org/books/ ("The Stalin Era" by Anna Louise Strong, which can be found in that link and which is a good read in general)

* http://bookzz.org/book/936296/93946c (on the role of industrial workers in collectivization)

>>3152

Hired labor, loaned money to poor peasants at usurious rates, engaged in price speculation. All three of these things would be impossible under collective agriculture.

There's always room for more questions 'bout Stalin.

sorry for the off-topic question, but from a marxist perspective, what would drive a fully conscious person to breed? If every person had a strong enough consciousness to realize that they were driven to breeding by biological impulses and not reason would they have incentive to breed at all? What would even be the point of the continuation of the human race?

Would it be egotistical to have children for the sake of having children?

thanks for the answers in advance. I am not a nihilist myself, just heard this argument before. I am not well read enough to have a good answer to it, I simply think that there is no reason to make a concentrated effort to kill off the human race, and it would be even more redundant for a nihilist to make such an effort.

An on topic question: On what basis does Trotsky, or any other reformist for that matter, claim that Stalin is a revisionist? And by what claim does Trotsky hold to the seat of the soviet union? Trots always say how Stalin cheated him out of his position but I find very little evidence of this and most evidence points to most of the party being very hostile towards him.

What were the fractions that existed in the USSR, post-Lenin?

here is a rare koba.

>>3177

>If every person had a strong enough consciousness to realize that they were driven to breeding by biological impulses and not reason would they have incentive to breed at all? What would even be the point of the continuation of the human race?

Well Marxism itself is based on the view that mankind is able to shape its own destiny under conditions of socialism and communism. Bit difficult for that to happen when the next generation won't exist.

>Would it be egotistical to have children for the sake of having children?

No. In fact Lenin criticized the opposite tendency: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/jun/29.htm

>On what basis does Trotsky, or any other reformist for that matter, claim that Stalin is a revisionist?

They claim that to believe it is possible to achieve socialism in one or a bunch of countries (rather than as a worldwide phenomenon) is a "nationalist deviation." That's basically the central point. It's what allows them to label everyone from Stalin himself to Mao, Tito, Khrushchev, Gorbachev, Castro, Deng, etc., etc. as "Stalinists."

>What were the fractions that existed in the USSR, post-Lenin?

In the 1920s it was basically Trotsky and Zinoviev creating a "left" faction and Bukharin on the right.

A good account is contained in the first chapters of this work (although the whole work is worth reading): https://archive.org/details/SovietPolicyAndItsCritics

What were the main reasons why Stalin thought the material conditions were right to end the NEP and start collectivization?

On a related note: Was Bukharin a revisionist whose economic views endangered the development of socialism in Russia or was his (continued) support for the NEP justifiable?

I'm asking this especially because Gorbachev and Deng Xiaoping cited Bukharin as basis for their capitalist reforms. Is this a defamation of his legacy or was Bukharin a bourgie in disguise?

Lastly what is one to make of his statements about forced collectivization being excessively violent and Stalin being "a devil"?

Next I'd like to ask which of Khrushchev's policies exactly turned the USSR from a socialist into a state-capitalist country?

Also was Stalin a cat or a dog person?

>>3200

Industrial production had reached its prewar levels by the time collectivization and industrialization were begun. That was a major reason.

Bukharin was originally an ultra-leftist; it's rather well-known that during the Brest-Litovsk debacle, while Trotsky was uselessly putting forward his "neither peace nor war" formula against Lenin, Bukharin was siding with Trotsky and claiming that any agreement with the Germans would be a "betrayal" of the revolution.

By the mid-late 20s Bukharin had shifted to the right. He called on the kulaks to "enrich yourselves" and for socialism to be built "at a snail's pace." As far as his Marxism went, Lenin's own words are instructive: "his theoretical views can be classified as fully Marxist only with great reserve, for there is something scholastic about him (he has never made a study of the dialectics, and, I think, never fully understood it)."

>Lastly what is one to make of his statements about forced collectivization being excessively violent and Stalin being "a devil"?

Bukharin was trying to ally with others to overthrow the Party leadership represented by Stalin. He even discussed the possibility of assassinating him: http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv8n1/bukharin.htm

As for collectivization being "excessively" violent, so is any class struggle which is met with resistance. Stalin's "Dizzy with Success" article, as well as numerous resolutions and other measures undertaken to limit excesses, are a fine answer.

>Next I'd like to ask which of Khrushchev's policies exactly turned the USSR from a socialist into a state-capitalist country?

There's a whole bunch. Right-wing economic policies were carried out literally months after Stalin died, before Khrushchev consolidated his position. It's more than I could explain in one message, so I'll just suggest you check out the following:

* http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/archive/pano.htm

* http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/icmlpo/US24/greece24.htm

* http://www.oneparty.co.uk/html/book/ussrmenu.html

>Also was Stalin a cat or a dog person?

I don't think he had pets.