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Thread: What were the differences among Trotsky, Lenin and Stalin?

  1. #41
    Kritias's Avatar Petite bourgeois
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    Default Re: What were the differences among Trotsky, Lenin and Stalin?

    Quote Originally Posted by Heathen Hammer View Post
    Like I said, you haven't presented any actual sources, just insinuations that are clearly debunked by conventional ones. Like German government itself confirming that they funded Lenin and his insurrection in Russia.
    Perhaps the problem is that sources you refer to are just blogs and weird darkweb forums or wherever is that whole Stalinist revisionism stuff is coming from.
    I don't think simping for the biggest mass-murderers in history is going to make you ideology seem sane or attractive to normal people. Even fascists try to present themselves as wholesome from time to time, so the whole "Stalin did nothing wrong" thing just makes you guys look bad.
    And its funny how its always some Western college kids that think USSR and Communist China were/are great.
    Please, you wouldn't know an actual source if it clapped you over the head. The German Government has said exactly what was known ever since 1917. That the Germans allowed Lenin to leave his exile from Switzerland to go to Petrograd on board of a German train. They forwarded money for pamphlets, and weapons. They did so hoping that Lenin would succeed and that it would kick Russia out of WW1. What they didn't expect, of course, was that the October Revolution would in turn inspire German workers to revolt in 1918 and thus be kicked out of the war themselves. Just for reference of how well known fact it was, here's Harold Williams, journalist present in Lenin's arrival:

    "Lenin, leader of the extreme faction of the Social Democrats, arrived here on Monday night by way of Germany. His action in accepting from the German government a passage from Switzerland through Germany arouses intense indignation here. He has come back breathing fire, and demanding the immediate and unconditional conclusions of peace, civil war against the army and government, and vengeance on Kerensky and Chkheidze, whom he describes as traitors to the cause of International Socialism.”
    The fact that Lenin took German money to kick start the revolution was not only known from the start, Lenin himself didn't deny it. As he didn't deny that he returned the favour by funding revolution in Germany. Which he did in 1918 - and brought WW1 to an end, since the German workers and sailors toppled the Kaiser and his government. The stories that Lenin was a German agent, however, remains just a myth.

    That you'd gather from everything I wrote that I suggest Stalin did nothing wrong is another example of the make-believe universe of the alt-right. I already wrote that archival research shows he killed somewhere between 800,000 to 2,5 million people. The fact that you'd see this as some sort of exhoneration of Stalin just speaks volumes about your motives - it's not enough that Stalin killed people, he has to be made to have killed more people than Hitler. Evidence of you claiming just that here:

    Stalin was clearly disillusioned with certain aspects of his comrades, hence why he probably wiped out more communists in his tenure as Genreal Secreatary then all social nationalist regimes of Central Europe of that time.
    The fact that you'd consider Chigago University Press as some sort of darkweb forum also speaks volumes about your separation from real science. It would be funny, if it weren't so deeply tragic. Open a book man. Go to a college. Do something.

    Where have I claimed that Communist China is great? Provide the evidence from my posts. I asked you what exactly you refer to since it's not always easy (or interesting) to catch up with the latest red scare craze in the US.

    To wrap this up, you clearly saw your arguments are hot garbage and decided to play the 'genocide denier' card. However, the only one here claiming that if Stalin hasn't killed 40 plus millions then he has done nothing wrong - is you. Sorry for bursting your bubble, but you're welcome.-

    PS: You still haven't clarified how exactly Trotsky committed genocide, and against whom. You called him a genocidal maniac.
    Last edited by Kritias; August 08, 2021 at 01:03 PM.
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  2. #42
    chriscase's Avatar Chairman Miao
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    Default Re: What were the differences among Trotsky, Lenin and Stalin?

    Let's keep the discussion tied more directly to the OP, which is asking about three historical figures and how they differed, "In their way of thinking about both politics and economy."

    Controversy about Stalin's crimes, the legitimacy of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, and the nature of Marxist ideology in general has some place here but we need to avoid veering off too far from the original question.

    So we will consider the questions of Stalin's crimes, the legitimacy of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, and the nature of Marxist ideology in general to have been sufficiently discussed for the purposes of this thread and move on to other, more direct aspects of the political and economic thoughts of Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin.

    This means that further forays into this topic need to be tied directly to the thought (represented in writings, quotes, etc.) of the aforementioned three people. Further digressions will be removed.
    Last edited by chriscase; August 08, 2021 at 03:50 PM.

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  3. #43
    Kritias's Avatar Petite bourgeois
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    Default Re: What were the differences among Trotsky, Lenin and Stalin?

    Let’s discuss Stalin’s policies for a brief moment. Firstly, he ordered most of the October revolutionaries arrested and shot, then he targeted Trotsky’s supporters or other allegedly counter-revolutionaries to what amounts to 800.000-2.5 million people dying for counter-revolutionary crimes according to archival research. Beware that since a lot of other crimes were considered ‘counter-revolutionary’ like sabotage, espionage, hooliganism etc we don’t really know the true number of socialists and Marxists he really had murdered. A good read about how the Great Terror was perceived by ordinary soviet people is “Intimacy and Terror: Soviet Diaries of the 1930s” by N. Korenevskaya and T. Lahusen.

    Secondly, Stalin focused primarily on industrializing, collectivizing the farmlands, building the Red Army, and getting rid of those he perceived as a threat (Trotskyists, counterrevolutionaries etc). Stalin is usually depicted far more competent and consistent than he really was. His policies zig zagged a lot, as I will discuss later on, and usually he stole ideas from other factions and presented them as his own, while at the same time delaying, then panicking and finally botching their implementation. Using the state as one big corporation he perceived deportations as shifting company departments from one place to the other; usually with catastrophic results leading to hundreds of thousands of dead in every single instance because of delays, recalculations, redirections, and other zig zags Stalin’s policies went through that caused people to die. Famines, which were very common in Eastern Europe that time (for example, famines and droughts in Russia during the last 100 years happened in the following years: 1901, 1906, 1911, 1920, 1924, 1931, 1936, 1939, 1946, 1948, 1984, 1991, 1995) were also treated by Stalin as of secondary or even of lesser importance with similar catastrophic results. Holodomor and its millions of dead are an example of Stalin’s shifting focus from individual peasant economy to building ‘communism’ faster despite the human cost – and it came seemingly out of thin air.

    Contrary to popular belief Soviet government was far more fragmented in the early Soviet history with three major factions: the Stalinists, a right “deviation” led by Rykov, and the Left Opposition led by Trotsky (later Zinoviev and Kamenev). According to Trotsky’s “Revolution Betrayed” (p. 26-27), Stalin and the ruling coalition were at first completely against the nationalization of land and collectivization:

    “A small commodity economy inevitably produces exploiters. In proportion as the villages recovered, the differentiation within the peasant mass began to grow. This development fell into the old well-trodden ruts. The growth of the kulak far outstripped the general growth of agriculture. The policy of the government under the slogan "face to the country" was actually a turning of its face to the kulak. Agricultural taxes fell upon the poor far more heavily than upon the well to do, who moreover skimmed the cream of the state credits. The surplus grain, chiefly in possession of the upper strata of the village, was used to enslave the poor and for speculative selling to the bourgeois elements of the cities. Bukharin, the theoretician of the ruling faction at that time, tossed to the peasantry his famous slogan, "Get rich!" In the language of theory that was supposed to mean a gradual growing of the kulaks into socialism. In practice it meant the enrichment of the minority at the expense of the overwhelming majority… In 1925, when the course toward the kulak was in full swing, Stalin began to prepare for the denationalization of the land. To a question asked at his suggestion by a Soviet journalist: "Would it not be expedient in the interest of agriculture to deed over to each peasant for ten years the parcel of land tilled by him?", Stalin answered : "Yes, and even for forty years." The People's Commissar of Agriculture of Georgia, upon Stalin's own initiative, introduced the draft of a law denationalizing the land. The aim was to give the farmer confidence in his own future. While this was going on, in the spring of 1926, almost 60 per cent of the grain destined for sale was in the hands of 6 per cent of the peasant proprietors!”
    In the same book, the economic dependance on the kulaks allegedly backfired because of their alleged capitalistic tendencies, sending Stalin and the ruling party into a panic, who then took a half-baked five-year plan they stole from the Left Opposition and presented it as their own (p. 33-34):

    “The strengthened kulak carried with him the middle peasant and subjected the cities to a grain blockade. In January 1928 the working class stood face to face with the shadow of an advancing famine. History knows how to play spiteful jokes. In that very month, when the kulaks were taking the revolution by the throat, the representatives of the Left Opposition were thrown into prison or banished to different parts of Siberia in punishment for their "panic" before the specter of the kulak. The government tried to pretend that the grain strike was caused by the naked hostility of the kulak (where did he come from?) to the socialist state--that is, by ordinary political motives. But the kulak is little inclined to that kind of "idealism." If he hid his grain, it was because the bargain offered him was unprofitable. For the very same reason he managed to bring under his influence wide sections of the peasantry. Mere repressions against kulak sabotage were obviously inadequate. It was necessary to change the policy. Even yet, however, no little time was spent in vacillation. Rykov, then still head of the government, announced in July 1928 : "To develop individual farms is ... the chief task of the party." And Stalin seconded him : "There are people who think that individual farms have exhausted their usefulness, that we should not support them .... These people have nothing in common with the line of our party." Less than a year later, the line of the party had nothing in common with those words. The dawn of "complete collectivization" was on the horizon.”
    Later in the same book (p.37-39):

    “Industrialization was put upon the order of the day. Self-satisfied quietism was replaced by a panic of haste. The half-forgotten slogan of Lenin, "catch up with and outstrip," was filled out with the words, "in the shortest possible time." The minimalist five-year plan, already confirmed in principle by a congress of the party, gave place to a new plan, the fundamental elements of which were borrowed in toto from the platform of the shattered Left Opposition. Dnieperstroy, only yesterday likened to a gramophone, today occupied the center of attention. After the first new successes the slogan was advanced : "Achieve the five-year plan in four years." The startled empirics now decided that everything was possible. Opportunism, as has often happened in history, turned into its opposite, adventurism...

    The press which only yesterday had been denying the existence of the kulaks, today, on a signal from above, discovered them not only in the villages, but in the party itself. It was revealed that the communist nuclei were frequently dominated by rich peasants possessing complicated machinery, employing hired labor, concealing from the government hundreds and thousands of pounds of grain, and implacably denouncing the "Trotskyist" policy. In order to feed the cities, it was necessary immediately to take from the kulak the daily bread. This could be achieved only by force. The expropriation of the grain reserve, and that not only of the kulak but of the middle peasant, was called, in the official language. "extraordinary measures!' This phrase is supposed to mean that tomorrow everything will fall back into the old rut. But the peasants did not believe these fine words, and they were right. The violent seizures of grain deprived the well-off peasants of their motive to increased sowings. The hired hands and the poor peasants found themselves without work. Agriculture again arrived in a blind alley, and with it the state. It was necessary at any cost to reform the "general line."

    Stalin and Molotov, still giving individual farming the chief place, began to emphasize the necessity of a swifter development of the soviet and collective farms. But since the bitter need of food did not permit a cessation of military expeditions into the country, the program of promoting individual farms was left hanging in the air. It was necessary to "slip down" to collectivization. The temporary "extraordinary measures" for the collection of grain developed unexpectedly into a program of "liquidation of the kulaks as a class." From the shower of contradictory commands, more copious than food rations, it became evident that on the peasant question the government had not only no five-year plan, but not even a five months' program. According to the new plan, drawn up under the spur of a food crisis, collective farms were at the end of five years to comprise about 2o per cent of the peasant holdings. This program-whose immensity will be clear when you consider that during the preceding ten years collectivization had affected less than 1 per cent of the country-was nevertheless by the middle of the five years left far behind. In November 1929, Stalin, abandoning his own vacillations, announced the end of individual farming. The peasants, he said, are entering the collective farms "in whole villages, counties and even provinces." Yakovlev, who two years before had insisted that the collectives would for many years remain only "islands in a sea of peasant holdings," now received an order as People's Commissar of Agriculture to "liquidate the kulaks as a class," and establish complete collectivization at "the earliest possible date." In the year 1929, the proportion of collective farms rose from 1.7 per cent to 3.9 per cent In 1930 it rose to 23.6, in 1931 to 5 2.7, in 1932 to 61.5 per cent.

    At the present time hardly anybody would be foolish enough to repeat the twaddle of liberals to the effect that collectivization as a whole was accomplished by naked force. In former historic epochs the peasants in their struggle for land have at one time raised an insurrection against the landlords, at another sent a stream of colonizers into untilled regions, at still another rushed into all kinds of sects which promised to reward the muzhik with heaven's vacancies for his narrow quarters on earth. Now, after the expropriation of the great estates and the extreme parcellation of the land, the union of these small parcels into big tracts had become a question of life and death for the peasants, for agriculture, and for society as a whole… The problem, however, is far from settled by these general historic considerations. The real possibilities of collectivization are determined, not by the depth of the impasse in the villages and not by the administrative energy of the government, but primarily by the existing productive resources-that is, the ability of the industries to furnish large-scale agriculture with the requisite machinery. These material conditions were lacking. The collective farms were set up with an equipment suitable in the main only for small scale farming. In these conditions an exaggeratedly swift collectivization took the character of an economic adventure...

    Twenty-five million isolated peasant egoisms, which yesterday had been the sole motive force of agriculture-* weak like an old farmer's nag, but nevertheless forces the bureaucracy tried to replace at one gesture by the commands of two thousand collective farm administrative offices, lacking technical equipment, agronomic knowledge and the support of the peasants themselves. The dire consequences of this adventurism soon followed, and they lasted for a number of years. The total harvest of grain, which had risen in 1930 to 835 million hundredweight, fell in the next two years below 700 million. The difference does not seem catastrophic in itself, but it meant a loss of just that quantity of grain needed to keep the towns even at their customary hunger norm. In technical culture the results were still worse. On the eve of collectivization, the production of sugar had reached almost 109 million pounds,· and at the height of complete collectivization it had fallen, owing to a lack of beets, to 48 million pounds-that is, to half of what it had been. But the most devastating hurricane hit the animal kingdom. The number of horses fell 55 per cent-from 34.6 million in 1929 to 15.6 million in 1934. The number of horned cattle fell from 30.7 million to 19.5 million-that is, 40 per cent. The number of pigs, 55 per cent ; sheep, 66 per cent. The destruction of people -by hunger, cold, epidemics and measures of repression-is unfortunately less accurately tabulated than the slaughter of stock, but it also mounts up to millions. The blame for these sacrifices lies not upon collectivization, but upon the blind, violent, gambling methods with which it was carried through. The bureaucracy foresaw nothing. Even the constitutions of the collectives, which made an attempt to bind up the personal interests of the peasants with the welfare of the farm, were not published until after the unhappy villages had been thus cruelly laid waste.”
    Trotsky here mentions the series of famines that struck the Soviet Union in 1925-1933, and how Stalin seemed to have zig zagged catastrophically before he judged that avoiding starvation in the big industrial hubs was of higher importance than avoiding it in the rural areas. The Soviets then limited the supply of food people in rural areas were allowed to keep in order to feed the workers in the industrial centers. And after 300,000 Kazakhs emigrated abroad to China, Iran and other countries, the Soviets clamped down and closed their borders blocking the movement of people to avoid spreading famine by an increase of population demand in other oblasts. Reports on how many people died vary wildly and the issue is not helped because a lot of scholars include “future lives” (meaning a deficit in births that didn’t occur) in the total tally of the dead. In the case of Holodomor alone, it is calculated that the Soviet Union would have 315 million people instead of its accurate 288 million had the famine not taken place and the birthrates had not been altered by that fact: for some scholars, this gap in numbers is also considered people killed (27 million).

    Lastly, and often discarded despite its importance, Stalin’s regime turned the bureaucracy of the Soviet Union into the new elite, replacing (and often populated by) the deposed bourgeoisie. This led to a differentiation between the working class, inspiring George Orwell to write in his Animal Farm the legendary aphorism “some animals are more equal than others”. In addition to a new elite imposed, Stalin also promoted the Stakhanovites, making the lives of workers in early Soviet Union increasingly difficult with continuously increased demand in productivity, almost like in a catch-22 scheme. Stakhanov was a worker in a mine pit who allegedly extracted around 100 tons of coal in less than six hours; through the concept of “socialist emulation”, or competition, soon this new quota for coal increased to match every new worker record. By 1936, just a year after Stakhanov, the record for coal mining was around 600 tons in a single shift which as you can probably understand is a ludicrous amount of effort placed on a human being, considering that Stakhanov had already surpassed his quota in 1935 by 14 times. This Stakhanovism made the lives of soviet workers increasingly hard, especially since “strikes” were at some point allegedly included in the counter-revolutionary crimes (not 100% sure about this one though).
    Last edited by Kritias; August 09, 2021 at 07:02 PM.
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