On Socialist Methods and the Stalin-Era Purges
Posted by Mike E on July 13, 2009
We have been discussing the importance of summing up the history of socialist revolution in the twentieth century — and the problem of silence on such events as the “Great Purges” in the 1930s Soviet Union. In that thread, a commentator “Reading You” wrote a defense of the mass executions of those times. Here is a reply.
By Mike Ely
On one level, there is a mind-numbing contradiction at play. The communist movement (justifiably!) denounces the beating of Rodney King, the killing of Oscar Grant, the shooting of Amadou Diallo, the assassination of Malcolm or King, the jailing of Peltier and Mumia, the holding of so-called “enemy combatants” without evidence or trial… These are outrages — and often the innocence of the victim is a part of that outrage.
So what does it mean, if someone like “Reading You” can (with a wave of their hand) minimize the state execution of hundreds of thousands of people (without trial and often, it must be said, without evidence)? Is it that different because those were nominally socialist cops who pulled the triggers?
There were in the 1930s quotas for arrests (just like there were quotas for other forms of production) — i.e. the cops in a particular locality were required to produce so many spies and reactionaries. Imagine what that produced? There was permission to torture signed at the highest level. Imagine what that meant for the emergence of “confessions” and new denunciations of new suspects for the machinery.
How often we rage when cops in the U.S. presume the guilt of “perps” (”They wouldn’t have been arrested if they hadn’t done something” or “I can tell a criminal just by looking at him.”) Does it suddenly become ok, to arrest and punish without evidence or public hearings if the system is socialist?
And what kind of justice would the people get from activists with such a blindspot if they got to be part of a new state power?
“Reading you” writes:
“Mike, can you make clear what you are saying?”
Yes, I would like to do that. I would like to thank you for posting your views sharply and challenging mine sharply.
“Are you saying that if there were in fact 680,000 executions, they were largely unjustified? Doesn’t there have to be a more particular assessment of specifics?”
First, i’m saying that there HAS already been a more particular assessment of specifics. We are now seventy years after those purges and the soviet collectivization, many decades after the whole debate over Trotsky’s theses in “Revolution Betrayed,” after Krushchev’s speech of 1956, after Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1973 Gulag Archipelago, after Mao’s sharp rejection and critique of Stalin’s methods (over the 50s and 60s), after a rich body of scholarly work has emerged from the now-open archives in the 1990s.
Without (obviously) endorsing any or all of the works just mentioned (several of which are by notorious reactionaries), i’m saying it is rather bizarre for communists to ( a ) not engage these things publicly and deeply, and ( b ) act (as Avakian does) as if we just can’t know or say anything deep or complex or new about this period.
There is a body of analysis and debate that is rich, detailed, and nuanced — and it has gotten more so thanks to the recent work of scholars. And people will not forgive us if we sit it out, or answer with cartoon nonsense.
I was reading a book on developments in genetic biology — and one scientist remarked that “it will not be long before we will have pretty solid answers to all the main previous controversies around nature vs. nurture.” We will actually come to know much more precisely what is genetic and what is not, and what the interplay is. Similarly, on many matters of the 1930s, vast amounts of evidence and documentation is in, and the world is not waiting around for communists to come up with the final “particular assessment of specifics” — people are coming up with their own “particular assessment of specifics” in a real absense of communist engagement with those specifics.
And I am saying it is long past time to engage that existing set of informatin and a whole world of existing assessments. (And obviously, it is not as if all communists have abdicated — I have carefully studied this all my life, and met others who treat such serious matters seriously.)
Second, i’m saying that the evidence is quite unmistakable that the executions were in the hundreds of thousands (that is the low estimate), and the jailings (deportations etc.) were higher. And that quite of few of those who were jailed died there. (The issue is not specific numbers, which are disputed, but orders of magnitude which are less disputed.) And I am saying that huge numbers of those who were caught up in this were not spies, or reactionaries, or saboteurs, or deserving of death or punishment.
There was explicitly a policy (high in Stalin’s government) of “punishing ten to make sure one doesn’t go free.” There was a terrible rachetting up of harshness, so that the punishment for a casual remark could be denunciation, imprisonment and worse. (Should someone disappear into prison for saying “I wish the Tsar was back”? Mao, by contrast, said that people should be allowed to make such remarks without fear.)
There was in the 1930s USSR a conscious policy of “mopping up” — i.e. asusming that the time had come to remove everyone who had ever been suspect, or a problem, or had gotten some taint on their record (support for non-bolshevik parties in their past, involvement with an internal opposition, travels or relatives abroad, history of “making trouble,” and so on.)
And there was a policy of blanketly blaming all kinds of industrial breakdowns, snafus, accidents, shortfalls, confusion, chaos, delay, and disagreement on conscious sabotage — to deflect anger and impatience from those in power.
There was a conscious policy at the highest levels of using imprisonment and execution as the means of enforcing discipline within the government i.e. getting republic and enterprise officials to say “how high” when told to jump. (Molotov’s own wife was imprisoned after World War 2, held as a kind of hostage to his continued service.)
And faced with those official police campaigns, there was an outbreak of mass hysteria, spymania and massive false denunciation (a real dog-eat-dog climate of paranoia, where denouncing others may deflect attention from you.)
In other words, I’m saying that the heaviest means were directed in ways that dragged down large numbers of people — for no justifiable reason — while terrorizing the rest.
Who (among the people) would want to participate in Soviet politics after that? And those that did were trained to be the most servile yes-men and cautious careerists. Not only is that unjust, but it is deadly for the revolutionary process (for the existance of a “revolutionary people” to carry forward the revolution).
Are you saying that there were no persons engaged in counter-revolutionary activity in the Soviet Union?
First, there were obviously counterrevolutionaries in the Soviet Union. And yes, there probably were some conscious saboteurs within the Soviet economy — reactionary engineers or managers who wanted chaos and socialist collapse. But, that isn’t really the issue.
This society had had a bitter civil war. (And like after the U.S. civil war) the reactionaries did not go away, and some of them organized underground networks (just as the old slaveowners and conferates organized the KKK in the U.S.)
And there were new counterrevolutionaries — who emerged within the communist movement and its leadership…. who (one way or another) embraced political programs leading back to capitalism. And (after the purges, and through the purges) such people came more and more into power (certainly during World War 2, including people like Krushchev and General Zhukov, and then in the war’s aftermath).
Second, however, these purges were not, in the main, aimed at those networks. And the charge that the punished were agents and saboteurs were (in the main) fantasy, paranoia and conscious frameups.
I don’t think people like Trotsky, or Zinoviev, or Bukharin were secret Nazi spy masters and foreign-serving saboteurs. I think that anyone who puts that forward should go look again at the evidence of history (or else admit to a pretty militant and faith-based disdain for evidence and logic).
Clearly if you purge millions of people, and execute hundreds of thousands, your “catch” will include reactionaries. And there were reactionaries in the Gulag camps (as well as political oppositions of a more socialist character). But, the problem (in the Soviet Union by the 1930s) was not that the place was crisscrossed with vast spynetworks, assassination squads and pro-nazi cells that needed to be uprooted and crushed by relentless police roundups.
What there was in the Soviet Union was: Sharp two line struggles over how to proceed with the Soviet revolution — under very difficult conditions that presented very difficult choices. personally i think Bukharin was the first real “bourgeois democrat turned capitalist roader” — and his program foreshadowed Krushchev, Liberman and then Gorbachev.
Trotsky was (i believe) something else — with his own program, network and assumptions — much of it rooted in a view that Russia could not advance without western Europe, and so quickly going over to forms of desperate demoralization when Soviet Russia ended up standing alone.
But the idea that someone needed to kill hundreds of thousands of people to root out a Nazi “fifth column” in the Soviet Union is absurd — and, in fact, the purges did not prevent “fifth columns” to jump out, especially in those places like the western Ukraine or southern Russia most embittered by the collectivization and modernization of society.
The purges involved an overlay of several things:
a) a determined terrorizing of the “middle management” (inclouding especially communist leadership at the republic and enterprise level) to enforce an extreme responsiveness — in part as part of the preparation for war.
b) an approach to solving political problems and disunity that rested heavily on police killing or disappearing those raising political disagreements.
c) a runaway process of mutual denunciation and witchhunting that raged far outside any single central control (mutual denunciations, clique struggle by arrest, settling of old grievances and suspicions) etc.
d) an acute highlevel line struggle over how to deal with the threat of Nazi invasion (with litvinov, bukharin and perhaps Tukachevsky on the side of continuing to seek alliance with britain and france, and Molotov and Stalin deciding to deflect Hitler by seeking a “non-aggression pact.” It was a struggle analogous to the sharp fight between Lin Biao (on one side) and Mao with Zhou enlai (on the other) over how to deal with the mounting threat of a Soviet strike on chinese nuclear facilities.
“Do you believe that the raw numbers of executions, standing alone, necessarily condemns what was done?”
This is a fair and important question.
First, I don’t think the purges themselves are some kind of “rosetta stone” that “tell us all we need to know.” We are focusing on these purges of 1937-38, because they are a stark example of the previous communist approach to their own history — not because those purges are themselves the single decisive event of this history.
I think the study of the Soviet experience needs to study the whole arc… It is not so simple that a period of “red terror” condemns the revolution (though it has to be sharply debated whether the purges were an example of “red terror” against reactoinaries).
I think that the politics and directions of the 1930s should (overall) be sharply criticized (based on what we now know about socialism, about preventing the restoration of capitalism, and about the events in the Soviet Union). But it is not a matter of “raw numbers of execution” alone — all of this has to be seen in context (of isolatin, of Nazi threat, of the weaknesses of the Soviet state, of the extreme urgency of preparing national defense, the large swaths of resentful and angry people, etc.)
“Do you think, for example, after a successful revolution in the U.S. that it is not possible that there could be one, two, or three million relatively consciously counter-revolutionary people actively engaged in tryingt to restore the old system? Will we merely scold them with harsh language? Is it not possible that we might have to send lots of them to prison? Is it that unlikely that, in an individual year, there might have to be 680,000 executions?
To put it simply: Yes there will be millions of people (in a future socialist North America) who actively want return to the old ways. And yes, one way or another, the most active and vicious counterrevolutionary organizations (the modern equivilent of the post-civil war klan) would need to be pursued, exposed, broken up and politically exposed.
But it is starkly wrong to casually suggest that “Is it that unlikely that, in an individual year, there might have to be 680,000 executions?”
Yes it is “unlikely” that this would be correct, or necessary, or tolerable!
Yes, we should reject such an assessment, and we should make it clear that such events should never happen again.
Yes, that is not the preferred method. But wouldn’t that be better, if needed, than the possibility that these assholes would succeed, reimpose the imperialist system, and again impose the nightmare of domination by U.S. imperialism on the world?
Like Paul, I find the assumptions here “appalling.” First, that the dead in the Soviet Union were simply “assholes.” And second that problem of reactionary “assholes” needs to be (or CAN be) solved by mass execution.
No, on the contrary to what you say, if a post revolutionary society went that way, it would not be far away from creating a new U.S. empire, with a returned to the hardened, ruthless, murderous policies that massacred the Indians and enslaved African Americans.
As Mao wrote: “A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”
Paul answered this well.
In warfare there are extreme measures taken. but the episode we are discussing was almost twenty years after the Soviet Civil war — these were measures that erupted within a society that was not (yet) at war, or in the midst of an armed internal uprising.
To take another brief passage from Fitzpatrick’s book:
After the outbreak of the Civil War, the Cheka became an organ of terror, dispensing sumary justice including executions, making mass arrests, and taking hostages at random in areas that had come under mass arrests, and taking hostages at random in areas that had come under white control or were suspect of leaning towards the Whites. According to Bolshevik figures for twenty provinces of European Russia in 1918 and the first half of 1919, at least 8,389 persons were shot without trial by the Cheka and 87,000 arested.” (page 76)
These are the kinds of events that Mao is talking about (during the intense life and death fighting of a civil war). And such thing happened in the Chinese revolution, and also in the actions of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam in the 1960s, and so on.
But we can see the different scale (orders of magnitude) that happened in the 1930s — when in fact mass roundups and executions happened in waves (often without evidence or trial or records or family notifications) in times that were relatively “peaceful” — i.e.amid sharp social conflict but without a war, or an armed uprising, where there was actually time for evidence and trials and public discussion.
Anyone who thinks that second kind of repression (recklessly using the full means of an established state in this way) is justified or should be imitated, has abdicated a responsibility to learn from this past, and has really announced their determination to become new oppressors. And even if you don’t think so, everyone else will!
And I might add: that people who want to conduct mass campaigns of execution should declare themselves early and loudly — so they can be carefully kept far far away from revolutionary preparations and future state power.
We must keep up the policy which we started in Yenan: "No executions and few arrests". There are some whom we do not execute, not because they have done nothing to deserve death, but because killing them would bring no advantage, whereas sparing their lives would. What harm is there in not executing people? Those amenable to labour reform should go and do labour reform, so that rubbish can be transformed in something useful. Besides, people's heads are not like leeks. When you cut them off, they will not grow again. If you cut off a head wrongly, there is no way of rectifying the mistake even if you want to. If government departments were to adopt a policy of no executions in their work of suppressing counter-revolutionaries, this still would not prevent us from taking counter-revolution seriously. Moreover it would ensure that we would not make mistakes, or if we did they could be corrected. This would calm many people. If we do not execute people, we must feed them. So we should give all counter-revolutionaries way out of their impasse. This will be helpful to the people's cause and to our image abroad. The suppression of counter-revolution still requires a long period of hard work. None of us may relax our efforts.
On Method said
Mike, in your post before this one you state that the question of Stalin in the 30s cannot be reduced to method (I am paraphrasing).
I don’t necessarily disagree with your assessment of Bukharin and Trotsky in this passage, however the fact remains that the so-called left and right oppositions did conspire with each other to go up against the forces loyal to Stalin’s notion of socialism.
This in no way justifies their murder and the rounding up those considered to be in the opposition camp, however the fact remains that these forces may have in fact posed an existential threat to the establishment of socialism as it was being conceived by Stalin. This raises the question of method, and how Stalin actually perceived this threat.
When Stalin asserted that classes no longer existed in the Soviet Union and that all threats to the state were thus influenced by foreign powers and their agents (essentially), and this line was put into practice through carrying out the purges you describe; an assessment needs to be made (if this is even possible), if this is what Stalin really believed.
The bottom line is that this was the line that was acted upon, this was the method and approach used to justify going after the forces of the Left and Right opposition as if they were counter-revolutionaries, which it can be argued that they were even if this does not mean (and I think it is actuallly nonsense to assert) that these opposition figures (ie. Trotsky and Zinoviev and their followers) were actually foreign agents. So again the question of method and what line was carried out in response to perceived threats is actually more important than I think you give it credit for. Further I think it would be wrong to assert that the RCP line could be reduced to “we can’t know”.
In fact I don’t think the RCP would actually dispute the numbers or the wrong headedness of “grievous” nature and consequenses of Stalin’s approach.
On both sides of the polemicizing between yourselves and the RCP I think there has been a tendency to put out “caricatures” (if thst is the correct phrase) or in any event, to not really capture the core of the other sides argument. In any event, I look forward to the time when your organization is able to put out detailed theoretical responses to some of these big questions you raise, something it is quite difficult to do on a daily blog.
Soviet Revolutionary said
This kind of essay is what is wrong with “Communists” today. It is pure through and through Trotskyite opportunism, masquerading as anti-revisionism but in reality attacking the legacy of the USSR
It seems Ely does not understand what Lenin taught us: the resistance of the bourgeoisie will increase tenfold with their overthrow. Kasama just wants to hug cuddle and lecture the counterrevolutionaries that must be smashed. Ha!
Why does Kasama attack Comrade Stalin like this? What do they gain from it? They claim to be about defending Communism from the ultra-leftist RCP, and you claim to uphold the legacy of the USSR, yet you only concentrate on the negatives of the Soviet Union. If this is how you feel about Stalin, then why do you even bother CLAIMING to uphold the USSR from 1924 to 1953? You obviously see Comrade Stalin and the Bolsheviks as a “new oppressor” who should have been “carefully kept far far away from revolutionary preparations and future state power”.
Communism is under attack in all institutions of education. we have the DUTY to defend the Soviet legacy of Comrades Lenin & Stalin. How can we defend our legacy if we are just providing more ammunition for the capitalists to attack us with our own words? This essay helps only capitalists.
Long Live the USSR, Long Live Lenin-Stalin!
redflags said
Well, the Soviet Union did not (in fact) “live long”. Nor did the Soviet Union (or China, etc.) manage to replace the leadership of their founding generations without giving way to some form of capitalist (and reactionary) restoration.
If socialism is a badge you wear on your lapel, and is in that rather meager sense the whole point – your identity – then no doubt understanding WHY socialism failed to find footing as a living “dictatorship of the proletariat” is a big waste of time.
Frankly, anyone who finds mass executions of opponents for merely disagreeing (!) to be commendable isn’t part of any socialist movement in any way I understand it.
You can put this down to Kasama, but the fact is that Kasama and other revolutionary communists are looking forward. We are not nostalgia societies, and if I were I don’t think 1938 is the year I would stop.
Great crimes were committed in the Soviet Union, by the Communist Party – and specifically, though not only – under the leadership of Joseph Stalin. The crime wasn’t transgression against the reactionary remnants of an overthrown regime, rather what the Bolsheviks failed to do was find a means by which socialism developed popular agency, specifically among the oppressed – and was too much a set of policies imposed by (yet another) Russian-style autocratic bureaucracy.
That the Soviets also worked quite hard to impose their organizational methods, professed ideological twists and turns onto the entire International Communist Movement is a big part of why developing a healthy, proactive and forward communist movement has been so difficult.
That autocratic, politically alienated form proved brittle. For all its bluster of “iron discipline” and that hackneyed phrase, so beloved by hacks, “unity” – the “do what you are told model of socialism” did not succeed in carrying out a “negation of its own negation.” It overthrew the old political forms, and did much to bring large parts of the planet into modern (non-feudal) life – but they did not bring power to the people. Instead of destroying the proletariat as a class, the Stalin-model Marxism-Leninism universalized it with the state standing in for the bourgeoisie. Which is to say that state capitalism stood in for socialism, and that counter-revoution came from the Communist Party, not some tsarist-nazi “external” threat. It was not the “big other” – it was the failure to see past their own model. That is the opposite of what we must now do.
What we call “Maoism” was but one attempt to extricate the revolutionary kernel of communism from the Communist Parties which had through conscious design, exhaustion, corruption and confusion treated the people themselves (which is to say: the non-exploiting classes) as an inconvenience. Soviet commissars were not the hand of some proletarian god, no matter how imperious they became. Maoism was one of many attempts, Leninism itself was another. Here we are, what will we do?
It is exciting, refreshing and hopeful that the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) has refused hagiography of 20th Century socialism. They have eyes for the horizon, and by publicly and plainly stating that the old methods don’t require resurrection, they are letting not just the people of Nepal know – but all of us, that socialism is our responsibility.
In other words: Communists moving forward refuse to be bound by any reactionary notions of “tradition”, Marxist-Leninist or otherwise.
n3wday said
well said redflags.
Andrei Mazenov said
While dabbing this essay as “Trotskyite” is puerile (at best), and the fact that summary executions actually gloss over class struggle rather than intensifying it… I think that SR brings up an interesting point:
We live in a world where people are taught to believe that socialism has proved to be nothing but a horror. When the average person thinks of the Soviet Union, they think blood, guts, gulags, and goosestepping- a violent police state which directly killed 60+ million people between 1936-1953 alone. Right now, at this moment, we have a duty to do away with such an image- and show that the USSR and China were not failures or nightmares.
So… what does an essay such as this do? Would this convince anyone to uphold the Soviet Union at ALL? Or to become a Communist? I mean, seriously? Any progressive person not already inclined toward our politics would point to this article and say “It because of is this legacy of history why I don’t want to get down with your politics.” Why bother upholding the USSR and our past socialist projects if they were as bad as you make them sound?
Am I saying that what this article says is untrue? Not necessarily (Fitzpatrick is a wonderful scholar). However, I cannot help but ask: is this what we really need to be doing right now, in the face of the lies and distortions that we are bombarded with every day? Will this lead to us being a transparent movement where people can appreciate our honesty, or will it just bring more fuel to the bourgeoisie’s fire and make people shirk away from us?
Mike E said
Andrei:
And what does it mean that your discussion doesn’t start with whether it is true or not, but rather whether the truth is convenient?
When Darwin published his theory, a Victorian lady is supposed to have said: “We have descended from the apes! Let’s hope it isn’t true. But if it is, let us pray that people won’t hear about it.”
What should our approach to the truth? And what is our approach to the most difficult episodes in communist history? And what do we say to people who will (understandably) ask us about those difficult episodes? What is YOUR proposal?
Should we acknowledge what happened — and then openly discuss our opinions on it (and what it means for our methods under future socialism). Or should we try to pretend it didn’t happen, and hope the people don’t hear about it?
Here is what I think:
ejkrigbaum said
You all have two worries:
1. that people today will look at what socialists did in the past, that is murder millions of people who did not agree with them, and be repulsed.
2. that any future socialist regimes with actually do the same thing all over again.
There is one way to get rid of this fear. Institute a system that places the rights of the individual ahead of the rights of the State. It is called Freedom, Free Enterprise, Capitalism.
The reason?
Because any system that places the rights of the State ahead of the individual will always do what you’ve been discussing. It will enforce its will by force.
In the words of a well known socialist who heads the Women’s Socialist movement: when the heads and owners of business resist our coming in and taking over what is rightfully ours, then there will be violence. Violence caused by those owners of business. (In other words, those capitalists brought it on themselves.)
What amazes me is that those of you who “think” you are being moderates and thoughtful people don’t seem to understand how those others are reacting to what you are saying. Didn’t you hear them? They are always able to jusify their murderous actions in their own mind. Actually, though, they simply don’t care about other living human beings. If they are in the way, just eliminate them!
What a bunch of nice people.
Andrei Mazenov said
You ask “should we acknowledge what happened?” I say yes, we should.
But what I ask is how, when, and where should we do so? Right in front of the enemy and in plain sight of intermediate forces (whom we will need when the time comes for revolution) who will see such things and be utterly repulsed? Is this the time or the place?
Let me put it this way: if a salesman tries to pitch you something that seems promising, but then reveals a list of myriad problems with that item, would you REALLY still wanna buy it? If you’re a defense lawyer, do you admit your clients’ possible errors and possible culpability in a case while trying to prove their innocence? Do you really wanna marry someone who constantly talks about all their terrible skeletons in their closet and admits to beating their former girlfriends?…
…All I know is that if we discuss our past socialist projects like we do above, we will- for the most part- get responses like we get from ejkrigbaum.
redflags said
Here’s a funny thing about all this: Trots of one stripe or another have been monday-morning quarterbacking socialism since the 1930s. It’s a silly game, the woulda-coulda-shoulda game.
Politics isn’t simply a reflection of ideology. No matter what we hope for, the political organs of revolutionary transformation will throw similar and, how could it be otherwise, totally unexpected circumstances our way. No matter what we hope to do, we will still face fraught choices under incredible duress. We can make all the right decisions for the times before we were born, but that won’t save us from historical agency in the times we make.
Socialism in the 20th century opened a door we still have to walk through. Now we know a few things, and we have to spread a scientific and progressive assessment of socialism that is 1) historically accurate, 2) extricates the lessons which apply to politics and revolutionary politics, in particular.
Yes, the Soviet Union and China shook the very foundations of the world. But they didn’t build the new one. So let’s be fair, let’s be honest – and let’s be without mercy when it comes to stripping the hagiography from both the ICM and the social realities on the ground for people, what they call “the people”.
redflags said
Andre: are we “pitching” 1930s Sovietism?
I don’t think so. To be provocative, we don’t need to pitch anything outside of our time. We should study the past, but heaven forbid we live up to it!
What is arising? What are the openings for the agency of oppressed people, and the forms and means by which they can politically conquer the ruling classes?
Understanding 20th C. socialism, in its complexity and contradiction is essential. It’s not the map we are following. There is no one map for us. If we are seeking to manufacture (or simply manage) existing maps – this would, again, be yet another subculture of identification and identity.
Dr. Zaius said
To reply to Andrei’s post above:
This conversation of purges, executions, imprisonments in socialist society has been happening in plain sight for decades. The difference seems to be that we are openly trying to talk about it. That we are trying to weigh into this conversation. This is our history and we have to claim it–the good and the bad so to speak.
If we don’t talk about it and explore it, will it go away? Will the enemy suddenly stop spreading wild ass disinformation about it? Will the problems of building and running an alternative society and dealing with different segments of that society vanish?
If a salesperson gives me a pitch and then reveals all the problems with it, I might not buy what they’re selling but I might give him/her some of my trust and respect for being honest and up front about it. If someone beat their girlfriend and still talks about it, I would investigate as to why they still do, is it because they are proud of it or is it because they realize that they did something horrible and will never forget and never do it again.
There will for a long time be some of the opinion (like ejkrigbaum) who may or may not be genuine in their opinion, but they are not from my experience the majority of people who would listen to this conversation.
The issue of not wanting “to clean our laundry in public” is similar to my experiences with the RCP around the time the new synthesis and the set the record straight campaign was getting into full swing. At first it was “look for the truth” then it was a tightening of the screws around people’s thoughts and questions when people actually started to explore it and wanted to “air it out” while other people around the Party wanted to hold onto their old views and verdicts in a re-worded fashion.
We need to get onto the road out in the open where society has been having this conversation since the 30’s or before and give a real materialist and radical approach that doesn’t negate reality or shy away from the ugly shit. If we don’t have this conversation in the open we regress back into the mold from which a lot of this ugly shit happened–behind closed doors without the participation of the people.
Harsh Thakor said
Let us remember that Stalin was leading the first ever Socialist Society in he history of mankind and was fighting a do-or-die battle against the Colonial and Fascist powers(Remember Hitler was a creation of the American capitalist classes and was supported initialy by Imperial powers against Soviet Russia)Imagine the difficulties Comrade Stalin had to face.True a new bureaucratic elite clas emerged in his era and there were ranks in the army,wage differentials etc.True he did not encourage democartic mass strugles from below like Comrade Mao.However remember the historical period.It is worth reading E.H.Carr in this lightTrue,we must condemn the killings of inocent party members and the supression of democratic Centralism .However historically it was Stalin who saved the Leninist State.Stalin led the U.S S R.to defeat the Nazi fascist forces.The Socialist achievements in his era surpassed all the production figures of he Western CApitalist countries and the Soviet Union had the highest literacy and employment figures.It is all the more creditable as the then U.S S R had no Socialist ally country and was virtually fighting by itself.(Unlike China after their revolution)
Would Socialism have triumphed and the Great Patriotic War won with a multi-party system?Infact it is likely that the Socialist State would have been overthrown.Did Stalin have the conditions to implement a Cultural Revolution in the pre-War Period..The International Communist Movement has to defend Comrade Stalin tooth and nail.We have to make a detailed study of the coup d’etat launched by Revisionist Kruschev.