Anonymous 2021-12-21 (Tue) 16:43:16 No. 655450
Kotkin is actually very conservative, he peddles a lot of Robert Conquest tier shit about Stalin. Iirc there's one passage which says that there was a route around the Kremlin that Stalin liked to walk, and that when there were too many ravens on the path one time he had them killed. It's CIA shit, idk why anybody shills him, especially tankies of all people.
Anonymous 2021-12-21 (Tue) 16:44:08 No. 655453
>>655450 where do tankies shill him?
Anonymous 2021-12-21 (Tue) 16:46:28 No. 655457
>>655453 I've seen some of the most vehement Stalin stans on this site cite him to support their arguments. Basically he says a few things that they like, such as arguing that Lenin's testimony was a fake or that the Soviet counterattacks in early 1941 weren't total wastes of time and resources. Its pretty obvious that they just cherry pick things they like while ignoring all the Victims of Communism tier shit.
Anonymous 2021-12-21 (Tue) 16:56:53 No. 655476
Kotkin's still a liberal, he isn't gonna be praising him. Also introductions and prefaces by libs to communist history are ALWAYS cringe.
Anonymous 2021-12-21 (Tue) 16:57:21 No. 655478
>>655457 Basically some elements of the narrative have been forced to change over the years because too much evidence is accumulating from archival sources from within and without the fsu, combined to the logical inconsistencies & contradictions of the old narrative.
At some point we are going to have a Kuhnian style shift away from the anti-stalin paradigm; Its already been happening in Russia for a while now.If China asserts itself in the info war on these topics even a little bit things will accelerate.
Anonymous 2021-12-21 (Tue) 16:58:17 No. 655479
>>655457 Speaking as somebody who is in general a critical supporter of Stalin and the USSR, wouldn't it make a lot more sense to cite sources from someone who is more aligned with their camp? Like Grover Furr?
Personally, ive read quite a bit of Furrs stuff, and honestly, I don't know why he gets as much flack as he does. His shit is well researched and he provides primary documentation to prove all of his points while combing over the other authors workcited.
>>655478 >Kuhnian style shift who that?
Anonymous 2021-12-21 (Tue) 17:00:26 No. 655482
>>655479 Thomas Kuhn, The structure of scientific revolutions.
Anonymous 2021-12-21 (Tue) 17:00:56 No. 655483
>>655434 Kotkin is an asset
Anonymous 2021-12-21 (Tue) 17:02:50 No. 655487
>>655479 >wouldn't it make a lot more sense to cite sources from someone who is more aligned with their camp? I think the point is to argue that even conservatives concede on certain points. However in doing so they honestly undermine other positions of theirs to a degree. For example its popular among vulgar Stalinists to denounce mainstream historians as agents of the bourgeoisie, dismiss practically everything they write as lies/propaganda, etc. The problem is that when the cite Kotkin and say that the evidence for some points is so clear that even "bourgeois" historians have to concede them, they're also admitting that these same bourgeois historians also have some degree of academic integrity.
Anonymous 2021-12-21 (Tue) 17:30:52 No. 655550
>>655450 >>655457 stalinists glow in the dark
Anonymous 2021-12-21 (Tue) 17:56:57 No. 655598
>>655434 >"Stalin's dictatorship, as we shall see, was a product of immense structural forces…." Literally contradicts the rest of your post. If the rest of the book is descriptions of these structural forces rather than navel-gazing about what Stalin ate for breakfast then it's good.
The USSR was gonna go through some nasty shit is the CPSU was intent on 'building socialism,' regardless of who was in charge. That's one thing the Trots are wrong about, "Stalinism" was a systemic problem of the post-NEP USSR and not just the product of the 'wrong guy' being in charge.
Anonymous 2021-12-21 (Tue) 18:01:49 No. 655600
>>655598 read Sheila Fitzpatrick
Anonymous 2021-12-21 (Tue) 18:15:52 No. 655615
>>655457 The only context I've seen this used was: "Even Kotkin admits that…"
Anonymous 2021-12-22 (Wed) 05:29:10 No. 656412
>>655434 Read Stalin's own works, dummy. Biographers are retards
Anonymous 2021-12-22 (Wed) 05:31:08 No. 656414
>>655450 >It's CIA shit, idk why anybody shills him, especially tankies of all people. Same reason why "tankies" so readily believe in 7 million dead from Holodomor, 700 thousands shot in Great Purge, 27 million dead as a result of WW2.
Anonymous 2021-12-22 (Wed) 06:49:10 No. 656452
>>656414 I love how radlibs find the purges so scary. Like if those happened in any western country, it would be great. They're all corrupt. I think they like to imagine themselves as bureaucrats and then victimize themselves.
Anonymous 2021-12-22 (Wed) 06:51:14 No. 656455
>>656414 A gang of thugs extorting a village only needs to occasionally execute someone to keep villagers obedient. An entire village going ballistic on the gang will always produce more corpses than a decade of abuse. You need to get over the obsession of having lower bodycounts, moralism is not a good place to be.
Anonymous 2021-12-22 (Wed) 07:10:02 No. 656462
>>655453 >>655457 The reason that tankies shill him is that one of Kotkin's central themes is that Stalin (and not Trotsky or other oppositionists) was the truest representative of Bolshevik practice, and therefore Leninism inherently leads to Stalinism. They overlook all of his Victims of Communism tier claims to use Kotkin as an authority against Trotskyists and others online, completely oblivious to the fact that this narrative was purposely contrived to discredit Bolshevik ideas.
The WSWS review of Kotkin's book is actually well worth reading for once. Besides exposing his political agenda it also reveals his "monumental scholarship" is a fraud. For example, despite citing Russian language studies he makes egregious errors in pronouncing Russian names in interviews.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/06/01/kot1-j01.html Anonymous 2021-12-22 (Wed) 07:20:24 No. 656469
>>655598 >That's one thing the Trots are wrong about, "Stalinism" was a systemic problem of the post-NEP USSR and not just the product of the 'wrong guy' being in charge. Trotsky explicitly denied the role of Stalin's personality in how the USSR was governed. Here's one of the most famous quotes from
Revolution Betrayed :
<Stalin is the personification of the bureaucracy. That is the substance of his political personality. There's another quote where Trotsky basically states that he himself would inadvertently emulate the Stalinist regime due to structural forces had he been leader, don't have time to dig it up right now.
Anonymous 2021-12-22 (Wed) 11:50:38 No. 656544
>>656455 There's no obsession over lower "bodycounts", you are literally spouting Robert Conquest's bullshit which was IMMEDIATELY made "truth" via USSR admitting to all of it, all the fucking things USSR denied throughout history the moment anticommunists had the chance. Have some critical thinking, please. All the numbers come from Conquest and got "legitimized" by archivists and historians getting their wages from Victims of Communism and VOA/Radio Freedom kinds of NGOs.
Anonymous 2021-12-22 (Wed) 13:49:45 No. 656619
>>656615 don't worry, dude, he will come back to tell you that the 700k number is bad because it was published by historians like Zemskov and Dugin (Nikolayevich not Gelyevich) who were allowed to work in archives during perestroika and that must mean that they were "Yakovlev's stooges".
Anonymous 2021-12-22 (Wed) 13:55:17 No. 656623
>>656619 This the same guy that uses a single speech from Stalin and a few memoirs from some krauts to discount the Soviet casualties in WWII, yea?
I remember talking to him and his argument was to accuse me of calling Stalin a liar, genuine demented Christoid-tier shit
Anonymous 2021-12-22 (Wed) 13:57:00 No. 656625
>>656623 Sounds like a power level even further beyond Grover Furr.
Anonymous 2021-12-22 (Wed) 14:19:34 No. 656643
>>656623 yes, that's him. but actually they are not his original arguments, they come from russian bloggers like Pyotr Balayev
https://p-balaev.livejournal.com/ and his "1957 anti-party group movement"
https://1957anti.ru/ and also blog called "Proryvist"
https://prorivists.org (these guys unironically think they debunked Einstein's relativity theory with their giga brain 100 lvl understanding of dialectical materialism)
Anonymous 2021-12-22 (Wed) 16:28:49 No. 656763
>>656643 >>656623 >>656615 >>656619 You people really, really want to believe in the USSR killing half a million people during peacetime, secretly, silently, without anyone noticing, don't you?
Anonymous 2021-12-22 (Wed) 16:31:58 No. 656766
>>656763 No I just don’t see wartime casualties as a competition like a fucking retard
Also what the fuck is “peacetime” in deluded tankie world?
Never thought I’d see one of you utter retards claim that fucking
World War 2 was peacetime
Anonymous 2021-12-22 (Wed) 16:36:57 No. 656770
>>656615 Also, your first pic says that if not for fakes from the archives, nobody would have taken 700k-large figures of repressions serioursly. You know, just like Zemskov came and gave figures lower than official bullshit numbers, so everyone started believing him, lol. And second pic literally says it's okay to kill inmates if they were bad people. Yeah, dude, secret order to secret forces to secretly kill 700k people, 350k per year, in such a total secrecy that nobody can find enough corpses to prove 700k figure. With present day Russia's archives refusing to give "researchers" from Memorial and affiliates any such lists of repressed people.
>>656766 700k people dead via Great Terror.
And wartime casualties are very much a competition, lol. Which system is more efficient suffers less casualties, doesn't it?
Anonymous 2021-12-22 (Wed) 16:37:51 No. 656771
>>656770 > And wartime casualties are very much a competition, lol. Which system is more efficient suffers less casualties, doesn't it? You’re genuinely stupider than the shit I took twenty minutes ago
Anonymous 2021-12-22 (Wed) 16:57:06 No. 656794
>>656763 Fuck kulaks, and fuck wreckers.
Anonymous 2021-12-22 (Wed) 19:09:19 No. 656917
>>656869 >secret private tutor was secretly murdered by a secret order because Stalin secretly didn't understand dialectics Yeah, nah.
Anonymous 2021-12-22 (Wed) 19:11:38 No. 656920
>>656869 So, I found this, while looking up that guy. How do I explain this to a rabid radlib, without giving that person the chance to call me a Stalinoid, because I would "defend" Stalin? I don't, but I think, there is a better way to criticise a guy, one disagrees with, than petty caricatures of said guy, which omit important context.
I cannot imply that I trust the Moscow Trials, because those were a clusterfuck and I'd need to do extra research if the accusations, which resulted in Sten's execution, are actually factual.
Ugh… the daily struggles of a communist, who doesn't fall into the typical ML or Anarchist camp and gets called "liberal" by the former and "tankie" by the latter regularly.
Anonymous 2021-12-22 (Wed) 19:22:00 No. 656931
>>656869 >Thoughts? If somebody makes claims without evidence, you can dismiss it just as easily as they make it. This is especially true for topics where there is a lot of disinformation.
>>656920 >How do I explain this to a rabid radlib, without giving that person the chance to call me a They are going to call you names as soon as you disagree with them, they are othering excluders, don't let them have power over you.
Anonymous 2021-12-23 (Thu) 12:42:57 No. 657719
*Bump
Anonymous 2022-01-07 (Fri) 14:37:59 No. 679784
>>655450 That doesn't sound CIA
Anonymous 2022-01-07 (Fri) 14:54:32 No. 679804
>>656615 the problem is where are all the mass graves?
Anonymous 2022-01-07 (Fri) 15:18:00 No. 679825
You should probably also read Furr
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