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zapnic
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okey i form finland and i say stalin was a fool .
he try conquer finland two times
but i think stalin was fool and that was finnish people's salvation
read finnish history if you what know more
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chegitz guevara
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Ft. Lauderdale, FL Communist Party of Apolyton
Jun 2000
time: 00:26
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I think moron's a bit harsh. He certainly wasn't a brilliant light, but he was very good at small scale organizing. He was the leader of the Bolsheviks in Russia while most of the intellectual leadership was in exile. Stalin oversaw distribution of materials and funds, organization of comrades, and activities. He was the most important man in Russia up to 1917, when events surpassed him and a new generation of militants took control. He played a rather unimportant role in the Revolution itself.
Because of his organizational skills and the need to reward him for his decades of work, he was promoted to General Secretary of the Communist Party, which, at that time, was felt to be a buziwork position with no real power. Basically, the Communists thought they were promoting him out of the way.
In large organizations, however, Stalin's skills failed him. He tended towards a hamhanded approach. If a square peg wouldn't fit in a hole, he'd pound it till it went in.
Stalin was responsible for the failure of the counter-strike against Poland, disoberying orders and keeping his army seperated from the other Russian army, allowing the Poles to concetrate their forces and defeat one and then the other.
When Stalin was ordered to negotiate with the Transcaucasian Republic (it was led by the Mensheviks at the time), to try and get them to join Russia, Stalin instead took an army down and conquered it. (One wonders how he was allowed to do this, bad communications one supposes.)
As General-Secretary, however, Stalin was able to move his own people into important positions. Able and dedicated comrades were sent on "important" missions to places which put them out of the way. For example, while Trotsky was convelescing from illness, Lenin died. Trotsky was going to come back, but Stalin cabled him and ordered him to continue getting better. After all, it would not do for the revolution to lose both its greatest leaders.
At the same time, Stalin opened the party up to bureaucrats and former Tsarist officials with the so-called Leninist Levy. These people's loyalty was not to the revolution, but to Stalin, upon whom they depended for party memebership and for jobs. Stalin was able to move these people into central areas, like Moscow and the newly renamed Leningrad. Withthose who would oppose him out of the way, Stalin was able to outmanuver first Trotsky, on the left of the party, and then Bukharin, on the right of the party.
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chegitz guevara
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Ft. Lauderdale, FL Communist Party of Apolyton
Jun 2000
time: 00:26
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Once in control, Stalin set about assuring that his control was safe. All challenges would be dealt with, in the most efficient way possible, extermination. By the time of WWII, almost every original Bolshevik leader was dead, with the exceptions of Stalin himself, and the feminist Alexandra Kollentai, who had stopped being political in the early 20s, and was no threat to his power.
The peasantry, having grown richer under the NEP system, chaffed under the controls of the socialist state. All foreign trade was conducted by the state, and there were few Soviet made goods to purchace. The richest peasants were growing restless and were becomming a threat to the state, thus they had to be liquidated as a class. Stalin engineered a famine which killed millions, even a close approximation of which will never be truely known (figures vary from three to twenty million). Legend has it that the famine was so extensive that census takers in 1937 were executed because the census showed evidence of a mass decline in the population of the USSR.
Once the peasants were dealt with, it was time to deal with the Trotskyists. After Trotsky's expulsion from the USSR, Stalin took Trotsky's plan for collectivization and industrialization and made it his own. While Trotsky's plan was gradual, Stalin decided to speed it up, implimenting the famous "Five Year Plans." Because of the similarity of the plans, many Trotskyists went over to Stalin, thinking that Stalin had come over to them. Stalin merely used them to break the peasant wing of the party. Now he meant to deal with them as well. Thus began the show trials and purges.
Because Trotsky had built the Red Army from scratch, many of the officers were personally loyal to him. Had Trotsky ever asked, they would have mounted a coup and overthrown Stalin. Trotsky, however, didn't believe that replacing a bureaucratic dictatorship with a military one was an answer, or that it would help the socialist cause (I would have to say he was wrong). This allowed Stalin time to purge the military of Trotskyist-loyalists. Tens of thousands of party members and officers were imprisoned, executed, and exiled. Trotsky himself was executed by a GPU agent in Mexico (in Diego Rivera's and Frieda Kahlo's house).
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chegitz guevara
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Ft. Lauderdale, FL Communist Party of Apolyton
Jun 2000
time: 00:26
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quote:
Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui
I would have loved to see the USSR continue under the NEP, and have an open economy. |
That was Bukharin's proposal, expand the NEP. If the USSR had the industry, it might not have been a bad plan, since the peasants would be able to trade with the state for things that they wanted and needed. Without that, however, the state was an obstacle.
Trotsky's plan for collectivisation of the peasantry was much more gradual and based on voluntary methods, such as making scarce goods and services available to peasant collectives before private farmers. Bascially, using the carrot instead of the stick.
On the other hand, I'm not sure that without Stalin's crash industrial program, that the USSR would have been able to fight off the Nazi invasion. Granted, we could reasonably argue that if Stalin hadn't pursued extremely sectarian policies re: the German Communists and Socialists, that Hitler may never have come to power. We might also argue the possibilities that the British and French General Strikes might have led to revolution if Stalin hadn't yanked their chains or what might have been if he hadn't strangled the revolution in Spain. But that's just conjecture. . . . I wonder if I can play a Trotskyist USSR in Hearts of Iron? 
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22-02-2003 10:19
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