Thank you for everything, Joseph <3
I have seen many interesting input from various anons on Stalin here, whether in the form of opinions, books, documentaries etc. They happen sporadically, scattered on different threads which rarely have anything to do with Stalin, ML or USSR. I figured a Stalin General Thread would be useful. A place where to share all things Stalin and discuss all things Stalin.
Though I am pro-Stalin, this is not a strictly Stalin-worship thread. Posts critical of Stalin too are welcome. I simply request that they are in good faith, and not just 'muh ML' trolls.
>>2350777In [Bordiga’s] long article one thing is truly noteworthy: the elegant skepticism with which he avoids taking a clear position on points which he nevertheless affirms to dissent from; there is the continual oscillation between thesis and antithesis, without for all that indicating an “original” thesis of his own.
Comrade Bordiga limits himself to upholding a cautious position on all the questions raised by the Left. He doesn’t say: the International poses and resolves such and such a question in this way, but the Left will instead pose and resolve it this other way. He instead says: the way the International poses and resolves problems doesn’t convince me; I fear it falls into opportunism, there are insufficient guarantees against this, etc. His position, then, is one of permanent suspicion and doubt. In this way the position of the “Left” is purely negative; they express reservations without specifying them in a concrete form, and above all without indicating in concrete form their point of view, their solutions. They end by spreading doubt and distrust, without constructing anything.
>>2351336the actual greek communists never blame stalin for their defeat
but the westoids always know better
>>2351776…
Anon, do you know about the bolivian revolution of the 50's
>>2351285Didn't he go into the trail and act like a smart ass and sarcastically agree to every charge thinking it was just a prank?
I don't agree with Stalin's purges for a very real reason is that Stalin probably knocked out good faith people who were just critical, while the Liberal traitor rats knew how to play the game and thus you got MI6 Beria and Shitlib Khuruschev into positions of power to ruin the USSR, but from my understanding is that Bukharin pretty much put the rope around his own neck and was like "YEAH BITCH BET YOU WON'T DO IT HAHA GOOD BANTS".
>>2351243https://redsails.org/critica-sterile-negativa/lol nice epic
Somehow Gramsci agrees with me so much to the point we even use the same phrases independently
>The position of this “Left” is purely negativeThat's really the red thread or unifying (even defining) feature of all "leftcom".
>>2350713You really couldn't make up the behaviour of modern MLs and their hero worship.
State capitalism & social democracy from the barrel of a gun has NEVER worked.
SIOC is a falsification and modernisation of Marx. Stalin was a revisionist.
I will give him that he beat the Nazis at least, that was pretty based.
>>2352830How he could let anything happen if he was a so and so from the Italian communist party.
not even aided the partisans, just one of the victims of ᴉuᴉlossnW's encroachment.
>>2352839On the morning of 6 November [O.S. 25 October] 1917 Kerensky's troops raided Stalin's press headquarters and smashed his printing presses. While he worked to restore his presses, Stalin missed a Central Committee meeting where assignments for the coup were being issued. Stalin instead spent the afternoon briefing Bolshevik delegates and passing communications to and from Lenin, who was in hiding.[13]
Early the next day, Stalin went to the Smolny Institute from where he, Lenin and the rest of the Central Committee coordinated the coup. Kerensky left the capital to rally the Imperial troops at the German front. By 8 November [O.S. 27 October] 1917, the Bolsheviks had "stormed" the Winter Palace and arrested most of the members of Kerensky's cabinet.
>>2353112Not even we in Greece hold that narrative, at least amongst the communists.
We made military-strategic blunders, and should have gone with guerrilla warfare, but anyhow ..
>>2351285even if one would side with them theoretically, and even disagree with the principle of democratic centralism, how could it possibly be justifiable to try to destabilize the USSR just on the eve of a genocidal war of extermination?
were they delusional, evil or retarded?
I assume they were committed to the broader cause of liberation, and even had some patriotic inclinations, so how did they justify sabotaging the country right before a total war, all over a party politics power game?
>>2351356Some of the shit you find on wikipedia is really funny though, like this absolute kino scene straight out of a movie:
>Other defendants apparently still hoped for clemency. Yagoda, who had overseen the interrogations that led to the previous show trials, made a plea for mercy directly to Stalin, who may, according to Solzhenitsyn, have been observing the proceedings:
>Just as though Stalin had been sitting right there in the hall, Yagoda confidently and insistently begged him directly for mercy: "I appeal to you! For you I built two great canals!" And a witness reports that at just that moment a match flared in the shadows behind a window on the second floor of the hall, apparently behind a muslin curtain, and, while it lasted, the outline of a pipe could be seen. >>2354309>I appeal to you! For you I built two great canals!Wrong. Workers built them.
To the gallows.
>>2354315pic related
>>2354309>at just that moment a match flared in the shadows behind a window on the second floor of the hall, apparently behind a muslin curtain, and, while it lasted, the outline of a pipe could be seen.This literally sounds like Aragorn's introduction in the first Lord of the Rings movie when he's sitting in the back of the tavern smoking his pipe
>>2356025no proofs, baseless atrocity propaganda
if things came out differently and it buhharin won the power struggle, and stalin was the one who got shot, left anticommunists in the west would be crying and shitting themselves about how evil totalitarian right-deviationist USSR killed lenin's protege the wonderful georgian
this the real purpose of this game, they pretend to care about these theoretical minutae, but actual point is to make real existing socialism look evil and retarded, while maintaining a holier than thou "real principled socialist" pretense, eg orwell's co-option of leon "let's invade poland" trotsky
>>2356042MLs literally can't tell the material difference between Stalin's and post-Stalin USSR aside from the great man in charge that's why most of them folded and supported the USSR bureaucracy until it dissolved the union (see Parenti)
Nice self own
>>2356077MLs understand the difference better than anybody else
you morons just go with "muh bureaucracy"
>>2356156western marxists are not marxists
They are anti-marxists with a human face
>>2356925>suddenly give them freedom to voice their disagreements you do realise the gobachev years purposefully amplified anti-socialist voices and drowned pro-socialist voices right?
Like, they produced scary shit about the Stalin era which even ardent anti-communists in the west did not do.
It's funny how you folks scrutinise everything in Lenin and Stalin's time super critically, but all this goes out the window for the gorby and Yeltsin years, and you just believe their word for it.
>>2356137>>2354298can you show me that this continued in the 1930s?
The guy said bukharin told him they will engage in terror. But he told him in the late 1920s.
He didnt reveal knowing evidence about bukharin and etc continuing these activities in the 1930s. Aka while this is damning that bukharin did consider doing it. The guy doesnt really reveal hard evidence that bukharin and etc did their thing during the early to mid 30s.
>>2356925>Suddenly give them the freedom to voice their disagreementsRead this essay. Also read, and learn about Alexander Yakovlev.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220718180837/http://www.soviet-empire.com/ussr/viewtopic.php?f=110&t=52073https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Yakovlev
>In 1985, the USSR gave the outward appearance of a stable and powerful state, with no clear signs of national, ethnic or social discord, and a political base of nearly twenty million Communist Party members. Six years later, suffering from an array of political, economic and social crises, the country ceased to exist. In the last twenty years, a rich preliminary historiography on the collapse of the Soviet Union has been written. Historians and political scientists have presented a variety of theories explaining why the country fell apart. Some focus on the inherent ‘flaws of socialism,’1 others discuss the role of strong intellectual, nationalist and popular opposition to the Communist Party,2 while others still focus on external factors such as the Cold War and the country’s failure to integrate into the emerging global information society.3
>One crucial aspect to understanding the country’s sudden crisis and disintegration which has been insufficiently explored by scholars is the conscious and systematic effort by liberal reformers, led by ideology secretary Alexander Yakovlev, to restructure Soviet societal consciousness.4 This endeavour was carried out via the re-evaluation of the present, the reinterpretation of the past and the disassembly of the old hegemonic ideology, social norms and moral values.5 Its ultimate result was the collapse of support for the Soviet project among elements crucial to its maintenance, including the mass intelligentsia and the nomenklatura. This essay will seek to complement the academic discourse on the collapse of the USSR by focusing on the effort to reform societal consciousness and its consequences.
>A secondary goal of this essay will be to challenge a widespread association of glasnost, both as a theoretical concept and as a concrete historical process, with openness, transparency, and the freedom of information and debate. According to most scholarly accounts, if glasnost played a role in the collapse of the country, it was by means of its unleashing into the open of long-standing public dissatisfaction with the regime. This is said to have resulted in the speedy institutional collapse of the Communist Party and the frail Marxist ideology upon which it was based.6 This essay will argue that such an explanation is overly simplistic, and must be qualified with an understanding that, especially in the crucial period between 1986-1989, ‘glasnost’ was in actuality very much a state-directed project aimed at the radicalization and reorientation of public discourse away from formerly hegemonic political and socio-cultural norms. Using the extreme hierarchization of Soviet political and social power structures to their benefit, the reformers staffed the media, cultural institutions and academia with liberal, reform-minded intellectuals. Once conservative opposition to reform crystallized, the reformers came to use many of the traditional tools and resources of the pre-reform ‘totalitarian’ system to disarm opponents, including their monopoly over the mass media and cultural institutions, powers of appointment, and direct and indirect forms of censorship.7 Only after the successful radicalization of public discourse and the marginalization of anti-reformist forces were the mechanisms of totalitarian informational and ideological control gradually disassembled. This essay will thus argue that the theoretical concept of glasnost must to a large extent be disassociated from concrete historical processes occurring in the Soviet Union during perestroika.
>Beginning with a discussion of the Soviet media, cultural and academic environment in the pre-glasnost period, the essay will then move on to document the coming to power of Alexander Yakovlev and his work as Central Committee Secretary for Propaganda in placing liberal, reform-minded elements of the intelligentsia in positions where they could influence social discourse. It will then examine developments in the media, academia, and culture during perestroika, and analyze how these influenced popular thinking about the country’s political, social and economic system. Next, the essay will consider the implications which the extreme hierarchization of power in the Soviet system had on the process of reform, and some of the ways in which the reformers used the ‘totalitarian’ apparatus to their benefit. After that, the essay will discuss the causes and consequences of the 1988 climactic victory in the struggle against conservative opponents of reform. Finally, the essay will conclude with an analysis of the results of reform, namely the destruction of Soviet societal consciousness. >>2356077Bro even fucking wikipedia has a page on the differences in policy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khrushchev_thaw>>2356925This narrative doesn't work. USSR dissolved almost 4 decades after Stalin died. Do you think his ghost controlled people from the grave?
>>2357974Holy shit! A blast from the past. Only real ogs know about soviet-empire.com Basically this site is what helped my initial strong initial suspicion about the trot/animal farm style narratives accelerate into total rejection extremely quickly, way back in 2006.
And the article is by soviet78 himself, one of the most based posters on the site. I wonder what he is up to these days…
>>2358779>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khrushchev_thawNot that anon but this is cultural policy, not political economy. Censorship was also more relaxed during Lenin compared to the Stalin era.
Similar thing for peaceful coexistence, you can see that as a degeneration in revolutionary spirit or whatever and you'd probably be right but it doesn't represent any shift away from how the Soviet economy worked under Stalin. And it's obviously hypocritical for nu MLs (Deng glazers) and traditional MLMs (Mao glazers).
>>2379703being a proletarian has nothing to do with having a correct critique of capitalism
case in point: most proletarians today absolutely love capitalism and feel a very strong sense of attachment for a system which obviously does nothing but create poverty and misery for them daily
now, maybe you might mean that the party didn't have a correct line but that's different from it just being, or not, "proletarian" because the latter terminology is just ML Ideological slop which is always just used as a way to justify whatever the fuck they want, it doesn't mean anything
>>2380716Mr Fiend
The mods deleted my Anti-American thread :'(
>>2351285For being on the right opposition AND on the ultra-left opposition at the same fucking time!
He was a contrarian for the sake of being a contrarian. You know, THOSE guys.
>>2354309As far as reactionary fiction writers go, I prefer Tolkien over Solzhenitsyn.
>>2354629The full title of his book is "The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation"
Ever wonder why they leave out the second part? The one that unambiguously marks it as a work of fiction? Most people who love to cite him aren't even aware of that.
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