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Unnaturally concentrated power always opposes coordination outside of state-managed structures - greater consolidation leads to greater oppression. > Soviet Un

• thehardsphere 9y ago
  Oh, so you're just ignoring the Red Terror? Or the murder of the Cossacks before Stalin came to power? Lenin never murdered anybody? The failings of the Soviet Union are the failings of an ideology whose explictly stated goal was the overthrow of every existing social institution. Stalin merely implemented the Bolshevik vision on a much grander and bloodier scale. Unless your argument is that the Bolsheviks were wrong (which would include people before Stalin).
  • danharaj 9y ago
    Ideology is not nearly as important as material circumstances in describing how history happens. > Stalin merely implemented the Bolshevik vision on a much grander and bloodier scale. I have a serious hunch that you haven't actually done any scholarly inquiry into the ideological landscape of the revolution and how that fits with its material reality. > Unless your argument is that the Bolsheviks were wrong (which would include people before Stalin). Well yes, of course they were wrong. The government Lenin established had to make essentially impossible compromises in order to survive. Lenin himself wrote about how they were making ideological compromises due to the exigencies of their circumstances. He thought that those compromises could be undone once the state had been stabilized. He died before that happened, and it never happened. The Soviet Union was always in a state of constant peril due to internal and external forces. It does not help that they were always militarized since its inception. No good civil institutions can come out of a state of perpetual war. My personal hot take which is not a position I would take if I had to give my opinion grounded in scholarship about the time period is that the revolution could have succeeded if the SPD hadn't order the Freikorps to crush the revolution in Germany; granted that they did so, it would have perhaps been better for the socialist cause for the USSR to collapse than cling to power. On the other hand, Stalin's USSR did the lion's share of the work in defeating Nazi Germany. What would have happened if he were deposed and the Soviet Union failed to industrialize?
    • dragandj 9y ago
      At first they did their fair share in helping Nazi Germany, their official ally until Germans decided that their pact is not useful any more and suddenly attacking them in June 1941.
    • nickik 9y ago
      > The Soviet Union was always in a state of constant peril due to internal and external forces. Mostly because their own ideology forced them into stupid policies that constantly caused chaos.
      • danharaj 9y ago
        That's not how ideology works. That's not how history works.
        • nickik 9y ago
          Yes. Yes, it is. I'm not saying Russia did not have any problems, but its absolutely unarguable that their ideology made them implement policies that made the problems worse. That is exactly how history works.
        • sbmassey 9y ago
          How would you describe the support for Lysenko's disastrous agricultural policies, or the persecution of the Kulaks, if not as ideological?
          • anigbrowl 9y ago
            Strategic. Stalin preferred to have absolute power within a smaller, weaker economy (but one with vast territorial and material resources available for the future) than to be part of a distributed power structure in a larger economy. This is a very common pattern among dictators, and this is where I cite Bueno de Mesquita and Smith's Logic of Political Survival or dictator's handbook, depending on whether you want the theoretical or narrative exposition of the same basic idea. Better yet, read both.
  • monocasa 9y ago
    The Bolsheviks wouldn't even say they were communist if you asked. Lenin's main contribution to Marxist theory as that of a 'vanguard party', the idea of having an intermediary step between capitalism and communism (a 'dictatorship of the proletariat') to manage the lengthy and difficult transition. A very Russian 'strongman leading' idea IMO, and there are certainly other schools of thought on how that transition should work.
    • varjag 9y ago
      Bolsheviks were a faction in Russian communist movement (vs. Mensheviks), they would totally say they were communist. Lenin's idea of transitional phase did not materialize until the failure of "war communism" policy in 1918-1920 became apparent. That phase was more-or-less direct attempt at implementing the tenets of Communist Manifesto literally.
  • losteric 9y ago
    Like I said, I'm a pedant not an apologist. The USSR was a miserable failure, but it was not a totalitarian dictatorship prior to Stalin's rule... "merely" an authoritarian oligarchy. The Bolshevik's ideology did not align with their actions - they didn't destroy the state, they built it. Their best achievement was scaring the US into going to the Moon.
    • arethuza 9y ago
      I'd have thought the USSR's greatest achievement was doing most of the fighting in the defeat of the Nazis.
    • varjag 9y ago
      Revolutionary sailors in Petrograd would stop a tram and execute the passengers that did not have rough hands of factory workers.
      • baursak 9y ago
        Was this during the revolution, or much later? Do you have a source?
        • varjag 9y ago
          Dmitry Likhatchov memoirs. Early months of revolution, hence still Petrograd. Class struggle is no joke if done properly, this isn't your typical plastering of Che posters in the campus these days.
          • baursak 9y ago
            So then blaming communism for these actions is a bit of a stretch. It's like blaming capitalism for any atrocities committed by rank and file US soldiers/agents.
            • varjag 9y ago
              I specifically replied to the claim that Bolsheviks were some mild, Singapore-style autocracy in their pre-Stalinist period. They were not, this was systematic, and of course it didn't get much better once Stalin assumed power.
  • googletazer 9y ago
    The Cossacks were split along class lines too, there is a lot of documentation on that. Young and poorer ones fought for the reds, wealthier and older landowning ones for the whites. Lenin at least was smart enough to keep some elements of the market economy around, tells a lot about his university education and coming from a minor noble family. Stalin was a huge piece of shit with three grades of religious education. If Lenin didn't kick the bucket too soon, the whole experiment would probably last a bit longer.
    • nickik 9y ago
      > Lenin at least was smart enough to keep some elements of the market economy around No he was not smart enough. He pushed the idea so far that they were about to collapse and then in a emergency move they liberalized because they had no other option. He and everybody else hated allowance that they had to make for the market. All of them absolutely hated it and the thing they debate most is how to get ride of the market. > If Lenin didn't kick the bucket too soon, the whole experiment would probably last a bit longer. It was not so much a 'experiment' as something that was forced on them because they did not have enough power. The NEP was collapsing because even within the NEP the USSR did so many counterproductive things, it could not have continued so much longer. Stalin did exactly what everybody wanted, but most people disagree with him about if they could actually do it.
• powertower 9y ago
  Oddly enough almost all of the people that spent time in the Soviet Union never saw it as a "dictatorship", but as the communist "CCCP". Also oddly enough, all the students from grade school and on where indoctrinated into the communist mindset using communist texts and rhetoric.
  • losteric 9y ago
    It's almost like propaganda distorts public perception of ideas and the meaning of words...
  • thriftwy 9y ago
    Plenty of people viewed it as dictatorship the whole time, most of which just confined their thoughts to themselves (diaries sometimes, kitchen talks sometimes).
    • varjag 9y ago
      Communism and dictatorship are not mutually exclusive (to put it mildly).
    • powertower 9y ago
      Name 1 dictator after the Stalin? I lived there before the collapse. It was a communist state. With centralized planning. And all the waste that goes with it. After Stalin, the Soviet Union had several levels of "above president" parliaments (with an elect and/or rotating boards), such as the "Supreme Soviet", that had enormous power. Presidents where forced to resign, some where placed under house arrest. A dictatorship did not exist there in the form of a president. Communism is Marxism. You will never be able to separate them. Nor change the fact that they don't cure human suffering, they produce it.
      • dragonwriter 9y ago
        > After Stalin, the Soviet Union had several levels of "above president" parliaments, such as the "Supreme Soviet", that had enormous power. The office of President wasn't created until 1990, and there was only one person to hold that office. Are you thinking of the Premier (formal head of government before 1990), or the chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (head of state)? > Presidents where forced to resign, some where placed under house arrest. The dictators (such as they were) were usually the General Secretaries of the Communist Party (including the three that were Premiers). Like most real dictatorships, rather than theoretical ones, there was a lot of power within the upper bureaucracy and shifting practical, if not consistent legal, checks on the power of the leader (particularly, the Politburo was powerful), and like most 20th century and later dictatorshios there was also a lot of political theater behind which the actions of the dictatorship were cloaked to give a veneer of legitimacy. > Communism is Marxism. You will never be able to separate them. Communism is broader than Marxism; as well as things like anarchocommunism, it also includes Leninism, which while it claims to be Marxism rejects several key components of Marxism.
• thriftwy 9y ago
  You will be mistaken to consider USSR before Stalin to be much milder. It did not have any reservations before expropriating crops from peasants and then killing said peasants with chemical weapons when they uprisen. Meanwhile in cities OGPU will happily shot you after a trial by three people, or even without one. Leo Trosky, who is still unfortunately sometimes considered as "Stalin done right", reasoned like this: Communists in power have to extract production from workers whether they like it or not, and maybe in the future the socialist state with advance to the condition where these workers will no longer feel expropriated. But until then, just use force.
  • losteric 9y ago
    And you are mistaken to assume a taxonomic correction suggests support of the USSR or anyone involved.
• nickik 9y ago
  Totally wrong on every account. Lenin himself set up the Soviet system and he himself put Stalin in control. It was a brutal dictatorship from literally day 1. This socialist fairy tail of the 'good' soviet union that was destroyed by the evil Stalin is socialist self-rationalizations. The USSR was communist in the sense that it was lead by people who strongly believed in communism and had a socialist economy that they hoped to transform into communism. Stalin was a strong ideological believer in communism and his communism was just as real as that of Trotsky or Lenin. His actions, specifically collectivization, very clear target the achievement of an ideological goal, that the majority of the party ideologically agree on.
  • fao_ 9y ago
    > he himself put Stalin in control. Except his last testament was to ask that Stalin be removed from power because he was too controlling.
    • nickik 9y ago
      Actually, that testament is hard to actually link to Lenin directly. There has been a lot of research on this and the document is extremely suspicious. Stephen Kotkin in his Stalin biography goes into a lot of detail on all aspects of the testament. Also, threw-out his career he went with Lenin and Lenin put him into the positions. Basically he had Lenins support all the way until days before he died. A bit strange to say the least.
      • fao_ 9y ago
        > Basically he had Lenins support all the way until days before he died. A bit strange to say the least. That's a misrepresentation at best, since the documents were written up over several months. In any case, it doesn't matter, since Stalin created the Troika, ensured that Lenin was unable to contact outsiders without his authority, made sure that his will and testament was never to be spoken of in public, and consolidated power and control to himself. Communism is about giving the power to the proletariat. Stalin can hardly be said to have done that.