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Ideology is not nearly as important as material circumstances in describing how history happens. > Stalin merely implemented the Bolshevik vision on a much gra
by 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 agoAt 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 agoThat's not how ideology works. That's not how history works.
- nickik 9y agoYes. 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 agoHow would you describe the support for Lysenko's disastrous agricultural policies, or the persecution of the Kulaks, if not as ideological?
- anigbrowl 9y agoStrategic. 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.
- sbmassey 9y agoI can well imagine that Machiavellian strategies of that type go on in most politically powerful peoples heads, but as far as I know Stalin never stated anywhere that his aim was to reduce the size of the economy, and the beliefs of everyone under Stalin carrying out the massacres seem to have been true ideological fervour for communist doctrine, so I would chalk it up to ideology personally.
- anigbrowl 9y ago
- dtornabene 9y agoI can't remember where I read it, I'd have to do some googling, but from what I remember there were very real material obstacles to the Red Army making it all the way to Germany. While the German revolution of 1918 was absolutely a tragedy (in a myriad of ways) there's some decent scholarship on how isolated the Soviet state would still have remained. iirc things like Polish nationalism, and internal disagreements within Russia( bol vs Left SR; bolsheviks wanted to wait and the Left SRs wanted to march all the way to Germany)