Someone asked me on my curiouscat my thoughts in Stalin, a propos of some tweets I wrote today. The answer grew too long for CC, and I decided to turn it into a thread, also because it's a good theme to discuss.
First of all: I can perfectly understand the allure of Stalin as a man, as I can understand the appeal of an intelligent gangster overcoming its many rivals by being more intelligent and more ruthless than them until they reach, against the expectations of everyone but themselves, the Top of the World. As it's well known, I am a fan of the movie Scarface. I recommend Suny's Stalin: Passage to Revolution, on Stalin's earliest career, specially the first chapters: suffice to say, he had a very sorelian (as in Julien Sorel) upbringing.
As a person in actual power, he was the opposite of the pragmatist caricature that it seems to be, for some goddamn reason, prominent. Of course, the main two arguments in favor for Stalin are the idea that "he brough Russia into the modern era", and "he won WW2", but both of them are extremely flawed. The second is the most obvious to me: Stalin destroyed the organisation of the Red Army from a very promising position when beginning the 30s, a surprisingly modern army (in both equipment and doctrine) with far more resources behind than any european country could afford to mobilize, to be completely wiped out, destroyed, and given to stupid retards because of mostly a whim by Stalin. Half the government was also purged, Stalin was unable to get the many factions that are common in any new form of politics under his helm and instead resorted to go to complete war of annihilation with them for, again, little reason: Hitler managed to coordinate the (many) factions inside the NSDAP with relatively little bloodshed (other than the Long Knives). Stalin main reasons to purge people seem to be personal, and ultimately lead to a hollow government that would create an elite incapable of perpetuate itself and whose order vanished once they did.
The industrialization is more complicated. It's true that, although the situation ("le semifeudalism") of Imperial Russia is clearly misrepresented, the Soviet Union had higher rates of growth than it had during the Empire. Yet, to which point can we really put that on Stalin, and not as a natural thing to happen on a country of such dimensions and power as the Soviet Union? Back to the purges, it's important to remember that a whole lot of purged personal were administrators of factories and engineers. I think it's fair to say that the Soviet Union industrialized in spite of, not because, many of Stalin's policies.
Stalin was, and I think it's the worst indictment about him, a man with absolutely no vision for the future. Under Stalin, the Soviet Union went from the first step of a new world to a bloated bureaucracy incapable of any power projection besides certain countries they were allowed to conquer. Trotsky was, as I said on twitter, a man of his time: like Hitler, he knew that ultimately their ideology shouldn't be about merely strengthening their nation, but become expansionist so they could become a behemoth that could compete and overcome America. This was a rational, dare I say pragmatic, far more pragmatic, than Stalin's fantasies of "socialism in one country". And while Hitler had, at no point, a very firm advantage against his rivals, this was not the case of the Soviets. I can see the communist army, at a time when there was no really strong european country, marching through Berlin, Paris to Gibraltar unopposed. As it's important to remember: the Red Army, that Trotsky of course created, was advanced, strong, and modern. It didn't have the many supply issues that the German Army could never overcome. It also had a great geographic advantage, and so on, and so on. A Soviet conquest of Europe and the expansion of communism through the world, China to India, was possible and feared accross the world, it had a big chance of succeding, and it would have made bolshevism a relevant ideology coming into this century. Instead, under Stalin, it became nothing. The Soviet Union was a rump state that only had to be contained for a few decades until it bloated and died. Stalin is the main responsible for it.
First of all: I can perfectly understand the allure of Stalin as a man, as I can understand the appeal of an intelligent gangster overcoming its many rivals by being more intelligent and more ruthless than them until they reach, against the expectations of everyone but themselves, the Top of the World. As it's well known, I am a fan of the movie Scarface. I recommend Suny's Stalin: Passage to Revolution, on Stalin's earliest career, specially the first chapters: suffice to say, he had a very sorelian (as in Julien Sorel) upbringing.
As a person in actual power, he was the opposite of the pragmatist caricature that it seems to be, for some goddamn reason, prominent. Of course, the main two arguments in favor for Stalin are the idea that "he brough Russia into the modern era", and "he won WW2", but both of them are extremely flawed. The second is the most obvious to me: Stalin destroyed the organisation of the Red Army from a very promising position when beginning the 30s, a surprisingly modern army (in both equipment and doctrine) with far more resources behind than any european country could afford to mobilize, to be completely wiped out, destroyed, and given to stupid retards because of mostly a whim by Stalin. Half the government was also purged, Stalin was unable to get the many factions that are common in any new form of politics under his helm and instead resorted to go to complete war of annihilation with them for, again, little reason: Hitler managed to coordinate the (many) factions inside the NSDAP with relatively little bloodshed (other than the Long Knives). Stalin main reasons to purge people seem to be personal, and ultimately lead to a hollow government that would create an elite incapable of perpetuate itself and whose order vanished once they did.
The industrialization is more complicated. It's true that, although the situation ("le semifeudalism") of Imperial Russia is clearly misrepresented, the Soviet Union had higher rates of growth than it had during the Empire. Yet, to which point can we really put that on Stalin, and not as a natural thing to happen on a country of such dimensions and power as the Soviet Union? Back to the purges, it's important to remember that a whole lot of purged personal were administrators of factories and engineers. I think it's fair to say that the Soviet Union industrialized in spite of, not because, many of Stalin's policies.
Stalin was, and I think it's the worst indictment about him, a man with absolutely no vision for the future. Under Stalin, the Soviet Union went from the first step of a new world to a bloated bureaucracy incapable of any power projection besides certain countries they were allowed to conquer. Trotsky was, as I said on twitter, a man of his time: like Hitler, he knew that ultimately their ideology shouldn't be about merely strengthening their nation, but become expansionist so they could become a behemoth that could compete and overcome America. This was a rational, dare I say pragmatic, far more pragmatic, than Stalin's fantasies of "socialism in one country". And while Hitler had, at no point, a very firm advantage against his rivals, this was not the case of the Soviets. I can see the communist army, at a time when there was no really strong european country, marching through Berlin, Paris to Gibraltar unopposed. As it's important to remember: the Red Army, that Trotsky of course created, was advanced, strong, and modern. It didn't have the many supply issues that the German Army could never overcome. It also had a great geographic advantage, and so on, and so on. A Soviet conquest of Europe and the expansion of communism through the world, China to India, was possible and feared accross the world, it had a big chance of succeding, and it would have made bolshevism a relevant ideology coming into this century. Instead, under Stalin, it became nothing. The Soviet Union was a rump state that only had to be contained for a few decades until it bloated and died. Stalin is the main responsible for it.