The Stalin Question

[ZANJ]

Everyone knows that Joseph Stalin, the leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union is controversial.

He led the Soviet revolution, and the world communist movement, for almost thirty years, towering over the politics of the world and deeply influencing the development of revolution and socialism.

The anti-communist gospel describes him as a "monster" and "murderer."

The experience of the Soviet Union is first profoundly falsified and distorted -- and then this distorted history is given as "proof" that communism is a nightmare (and that capitalism is preferable to radical change).

So unraveling the Stalin years is important.

Here is a sophisticated summation of those experiences by the RCP,USA (it was posted on the site I moderate: http:2changetheworld.info)

RCP chairman Bob Avakian writes:

"It is necessary, in summing up the stage that has ended and the historical experience of socialism so far, to speak once again to this question. I made a rather extensive analysis of the positive contributions as well as the serious errors of Stalin in Conquer the World. But right now, especially, with the changes going on the revisionist countries and the increasing repudiation and attacks there directed at Stalin and "Stalinism" from many different quarters, it is necessary to return to this and to make clear what it is we uphold and won't renounce and what we cannot uphold and must criticize in terms of Stalin's role as the leader of the Soviet Union and in the international communist movement over a decisive period of thirty years, from the early 1920s until his death in 1953.

"Mao used the formulation that Stalin's achievements were 70 percent and his errors 30 percent of his overall role. The essence here is not the quantitative analysis-- not the percentages, 70 percent positive, 30 percent negative -- but the overall assessment this suggests: Stalin mainly should be upheld, but he did make errors, including serious errors."

the rest of his detailed summation is here: 2changetheworld.info/disc/view.php?site=changetheworld&bn=changetheworld_test01&key=1047774218


Here is a mind-clearing summation of the positive contributions by stalin:

2changetheworld.info/disc/view.php?site=changetheworld&bn=changetheworld_test01&key=1047340964&first=1048043215&last=1041029035

[Andrei_X]

These two articles are from a Hoxhaite website and should be taken with a grain of criticism (due to the problem of most Hoxhaites being far too uncritical and too dogmatic concerning Stalin), but they are still very good articles that help disprove a lot of lies. Here they are:

Lies Concerning the History of the Soviet Union
www.geocities.com/redcomrades/lies.html

In Search of a Soviet Holocaust
www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Embassy/7213/sov-hol.html

Another View of Stalin by Ludo Martens:
www.plp.org/books/Stalin/book.html
(yeah, I don't like Progressive Labor Party, but it's the only place that I could find the book online...)

These links help provide some data and statistics that can help in disproving a lot of old bourgeois lies about Comrade Stalin. However, I personally like a lot of what Zanj posted because they both get to the heart of the matter- the POSITIVE contributions of Stalin and an OBJECTIVE, NONDOGMATIC ANALYSIS of his theory and his deeds.

So I would definitely recommend to all y'all to dig Zanj's links, cuz they are truly bumpin'.

[StalinRevolution]

Yes I agree

[eat the words]

The Stalin Era
Anna Louise Strong

The change in women's status was one of the important social changes in all parts of the USSR. The Revolution gave women legal and political equality: industrialization provided the economic base in equal pay. But in every village women still had to fight the habits of centuries. News came of one village in Siberia, for instance, where, after the collective farms gave women their independent incomes, the wives "called a strike" against wife-beating and smashed that time-honored custom in a week.

The men all jeered at the first woman we elected to our village soviet," a village president told me, "but at the next election we elected six women and now it is we who laugh." I met twenty of these women presidents of villages in 1928 on a train in Siberia, bound for a Women's Congress in Moscow. For most it was their first trip by train and only one had ever been out of Siberia. They had been invited to Moscow "to advise the government" on the demands of women; their counties elected them to go.

The toughest fight of all for women's freedom was in Central Asia. Here, women were chattels, sold in early marriage and never thereafter seen in public without the hideous "paranja," a long black veil of woven horsehair which covered the entire face, hindering breathing and vision. Tradition gave husbands the right to kill wives for unveiling; the mullahs – Moslem priests supported this by religion. Russian women brought the first message of freedom; they set up child welfare clinics where native women unveiled in each other's presence. Here, the rights of women and the evils of the veil were discussed. The Communist Party brought pressure on its members to permit their wives to unveil.

When I first visited Tashkent, in 1928, a conference of Communist women was announcing: "Our members in backward villages are being violated, tortured and murdered. But this year we must finish the hideous veil; this must be the historic year." Shocking incidents gave point to this resolution. A girl from a Tashkent school gave her vacation to agitating for women's rights in her home village. Her dismembered body was sent back to school in a cart bearing the words: "That for your women's freedom." Another woman had refused the attentions of a landlord and married a Communist peasant; a gang of eighteen men, stirred up by the landlord, violated her in the eighth month of pregnancy and threw her body in the river.

Poems were written by women to express their struggle. When Zulfia Khan, a fighter for freedom, was burned alive by the mullahs, the women of her village wrote a lament:

"O, woman, the world will not forget your fight for freedom!
Your flame – let them not think that it consumed you.
The flame in which you burned is a torch in our hands."

The citadel of orthodox oppression was "Holy Bokhara." Here, a dramatic unveiling was organized. Word was spread that "something spectacular" would occur on International Women's Day, March 8. Mass meetings of women were held in many parts of the city on that day, and women speakers urged that everyone "unveil all at once." Women then marched to the platform, tossed their veils before the speakers and went to parade the streets. Tribunes had been set up where government leaders greeted the women. Other women joined the parade from their homes and tossed their veils to the tribunes. That parade broke the veil tradition in Holy Bokhara. Many women, of course, donned veils again before facing their angry husbands. But the veil from that time on appeared less and less.

Soviet power used many weapons for the freeing of women. Education, propaganda, law all had their place. Big public trials were held of husbands who murdered wives; the pressure of the new propaganda confirmed judges who gave the death sentence for what old custom had not considered crime. The most important weapon for freeing women was, as in Russia proper, the new industrialization.

I visited a new silk mill in Old Bokhara. Its director, a pale, exhausted man, driving without sleep to build a new industry, told me the mill was not expected to be profitable for a long time. "We are training village women into a new staff for future silk mills of Turkestan. Our mill is the consciously applied force which broke the veiling of women; we demand that women unveil in the mill."

Girl textile workers wrote songs on the new meaning of life when they exchanged the veil for the Russian head-dress, the kerchief.

"When I took the road to the factory
I found there a new kerchief,
A red kerchief, a silk kerchief,
Bought with my own hand's labor!
The roar of the factory is in me.
It gives me rhythm.
it gives me energy."

One can hardly read this without recalling, by contrast, Thomas Hood's "The Song of the Shirt," that expressed the early factories of Britain.

"With fingers weary and worn,
With eyelids heavy and red,
A woman sat, in unwomanly rags,
Plying her needle and thread.
Stitch, stitch, stitch, in poverty, hunger and dirt,
And still, with a voice of dolorous pitch,
She sang the song of the shirt."

In capitalist Britain, the factory appeared as a weapon of exploitation for profit. In the USSR, it was not only a means to collective wealth, but a tool consciously used to break past shackles.

[Deleted]

I tend to dislike dictators. ;D I'll give Stalin credit for the USSR's contributions during WW2, but that's about it. I view his reign as being for the most part nothing but beaurocratic despotism.

Am I the only one who had hoped we'd stay away from the Stalin issue?

[Comrade Joseph]

Here is a good site regarding lies about the CCCP (during the Stalin period).

[readpunk]

Stalin was an egotistical tyrant. Whose control over the USSR led to the imprisonment of thousands of "real" comrades. During his time, the socialization process in the USSR made Stalin to seem like a god to most children. A pity for them their god, just like the Christian god was an unintelligent tyrannical murderer. I don't see how Stalin was even a communist? Communism is an economic ideology based on the idea of egalitarianism. In what way was Stalin remotely equal to his fellow comrades? If anyone could convince me that the stat's regarding Stalin were all bourgeois lies, and that only one single political prisoner died because of Stalin, then I would still say that Stalin is nothing more than a power hungry oppressor.

[heed da woild]

readpunk wrote: "that only one single political prisoner died because of Stalin, then I would still say that Stalin is nothing more than a power hungry oppressor."

This is an interesting standard. Let me ask some questoins:

Do you think it is possible to have radical change without imprisoning major opponents of that change?

In other words, can revolutinaries defeat armies, parties, conspiracies, police forces, commando units, racist cliques, etc. and then NOT imprison some of their leaders?

Another question: If figures on the counterrevolutionary side have commited infamous crimes against the people (as a Hitler, or a Bedford Forest, or a Denikin did, or the Grand Dragon of the KKK etc.) is it wrong for people to give them the ultimate penalty?

And, if the most notorious brutalizers of the people are not punished, is it possible for the oppressed to stand up and wield power? Will they believe "the sky has changed"?

[readpunk]

Guest-heed said:

readpunk wrote: "that only one single political prisoner died because of Stalin, then I would still say that Stalin is nothing more than a power hungry oppressor."

This is an interesting standard. Let me ask some questoins:

Do you think it is possible to have radical change without imprisoning major opponents of that change?

In other words, can revolutinaries defeat armies, parties, conspiracies, police forces, commando units, racist cliques, etc. and then NOT imprison some of their leaders?

Another question: If figures on the counterrevolutionary side have commited infamous crimes against the people (as a Hitler, or a Bedford Forest, or a Denikin did, or the Grand Dragon of the KKK etc.) is it wrong for people to give them the ultimate penalty?

And, if the most notorious brutalizers of the people are not punished, is it possible for the oppressed to stand up and wield power? Will they believe "the sky has changed"?

I don't believe in prisons. Prisons are for oppressors.

You missed my point entirely. I'm referring to Stalin, not to everyone. To stand gun to gun with a dictator, as a revolutionary, and pull the trigger in my eyes is a perfectly acceptable act. To stand over an entire nation of people as an oppressive dictator interested not just in squashing counter-revolutionary action, but counter-revolutionary thought, is entirely different.

[Cretinist]

You know, it would be really nice if the bourgeoisie would just hand over everything with a smile. Wouldn't it be great?

This is essentially what 90% of all radical leftists want. If it meant having to harm a single capitalist, then they would just as soon not have a revolution, even if it meant the inevitable destruction on the entire human race. Apparently it never occurs to them, or they just don't care, that the bourgeoisie are not going to hand anything over.

[readpunk]

Unfortunately I don't believe you read my explanation or was in the process of typing that when I posted what I said.

[Deleted]

No one is saying that they would just hand it over. The point is that these regimes that have brutalized and oppressed people in the name of 'defending the revolution' have failed to protect it every time. Since this method has been such a miserable failure, why do people insist on continuing to follow it?

[Cretinist]

It doesn't really matter if you're in favor of shooting some dictator. You're clearly against trying to contain counter-revolutionary activity, so you're no different from your average idealistic leftist.

[Cretinist]

SonofRage said:

No one is saying that they would just hand it over. The point is that these regimes that have brutalized and oppressived people in the name of "defending the revolution" have failed to protect it every time. Since this method has been such a miserable failure, why do people insist on continuing to follow it?

Who did Stalin brutalize and oppress? Kulaks? So-called "communists" who were just gonna hand over everything back to the bourgeoisie? Counter-revolutionary terrorists?

Oh cry me a river for the poor oppressed and brutalized land-lords, traitors, and capitalists.

[Deleted]

What about the say 5 million people who died in the famine caused by Stalin's policies? Having people starve while the USSR was exporting grain to foreign markets strikes me as pretty oppressive.