Just curious if it's a case of 'the ends justify the means' or 'it didn't happen'.
Tankies: How do you see Stalin's atrocities?
Caleb Sullivan
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Jace Gomez
Mission to Moscow by Joseph. E. Davies.
archive.org
Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence
cercec.fr
H.G. Wells on Joseph Stalin
“I confess that I approached Stalin with a certain amount of suspicion and prejudice. A picture had been built up in my mind of a very reserved and self-centred fanatic, a despot without vices, a jealous monopolizer of power. I had been inclined to take the part of Trotsky against him. I had formed a very high opinion perhaps an excessive opinion, of Trotsky’s military and administrative abilities, and it seemed to me that Russia, which is in such urgent need of directive capacity at every turn, could not afford to send them into exile. Trotsky’s Autobiography, and more particularly the second volume, had modified this judgment but I still expected to meet a ruthless, hard—possibly doctrinaire—and self-sufficient man at Moscow; a Georgian highlander whose spirit had never completely emerged from its native mountain glen.
Yet I had had to recognize that under him Russia was not being merely tyrannized over and held down; it was being governed and it was getting on. Everything I had heard in favour of the First Five Year Plan I had put through a severely sceptical sieve, and yet there remained a growing effect of successful enterprise. I had listened more and more greedily to any first-hand gossip I could hear about both these contrasted men. I had already put a query against my grim anticipation of a sort of Bluebeard at the centre of Russian affairs. Indeed if I had not been in reaction against these first preconceptions and wanting to get nearer the truth of the matter, I should never have gone again to Moscow.”
“I have never met a man more candid, fair and honest, and to these qualities it is, and to nothing occult and sinister, that he owes his tremendous undisputed ascendency in Russia. I had thought before I saw him that he might be where he was because men were afraid of him, but I realize that he owes his position to the fact that no one is afraid of him and everybody trusts him.”
~H.G. Wells –Experiment in Autobiography
gutenberg.ca
Ian Diaz
I don't respond to the term 'tankie' because it's an intellectual cul-de-sac and ahistorical word game practiced by mostly people on the left who are insecure about their own beliefs so they would rather that kill genuine communist discourse than having to engage something that might challenge them. It also reeks of liberalism because it can range from shitting on the types of Unruhe to genuine communists who just don't happen to be in the same special snowflake group as you do, having the same effect as labeling every revolutionary attempt "totalitarian" because it didn't happen to be "free market capitalism."
What Stalin did was pretty horrendous, in any case.
So good job at starting a shitty thread, shitty OP.
Jose Perez
Tankies do the same thing Nazi apologist do.
Leninist does not mean tankie. Tankie is tankie, people who are "fans" of Stalinist USSR. Or Mao's China. Really, any of the other brutal regimes that justified their terror under the banner of socialism.
Jason Campbell
"Without Sovietization and industrialization, the Soviet Union would have been destroyed during the Second World War"
One must distinguish two different sides in my position. My personal attitude to different events and the results of my scientific work. Our village has completely disappeared. If we look at collectivization only from this standpoint, then one can say that collectivization was a crime or a mistake. But you have to consider the whole situation in the country. The industry needed workers. The country needed not only laborers but also doctors, teachers, engineers, officers, etc. Without collectivization it would have been impossible to get so many people for the development of the country. We have lost everything in the country. And our family has left the country. But I became a professor. My brother became colonel. My older brother's director of a factory. Other of my brothers were engineers, etc. Many millions of Russian families have undergone such a development. For many millions of families, therefore, revolution was our revolution. Stalin's time was, of course, a great tragedy. But at the same time these years were the best years in Soviet history. They can not understand in what living conditions we lived. Our family lived in a room of 10 sqm. And in this room we lived to eight, sometimes to ten. And we were happy. Why? We visited the school. Everything was for us, the whole culture was open to us.
On the other hand, all claim that the productivity of the collective farms was very low, and private farms production was much higher. That's a lie. All those who say that make a wrong comparison. They take e.g. A small parcel and say: Look, on this parcel works a woman or two and they sell so and so much vegetables etc. But on the collective farm work 300 humans. Now they are investigating how these people work on the small parcel, how many forces they need on the small parcel. In the kolkhoz, living conditions were much easier, shorter working hours and, above all, the main result: the state has got enough bread. Without collective farms this would be impossible.
I am against collectivization. My family suffered from it. But as a scientist I must say, this was the only way for the country to survive. If Stalin had not done this policy, the country would have been destroyed immediately during the war. And industrialization and even these repressions were inevitable.
See today's situation in the Soviet Union, try to restore order, without arrests, which is impossible. Now many are already arrested and become more and more. At Stalin's time the situation in Russia was even worse.
It is a false ideology to assert: all the people were innocent, and only the evil man Stalin and some evil people have raped all men. This is a lie, an ideological lie. It was a struggle for survival, life and death.
It is perhaps the greatest injustice in history when Stalin is so slandered - it is particularly bad when Soviet people forget their own great history. In Russian history these years were the greatest years ever
I repeat, I am not a Communist. I criticized Communism since my youth. I was always an antistallist. But now I'm an old man, I do not want to lie during my life.
Austin Jenkins
Why do so many people hate Stalin and the Soviet Union at all? Because the development of this country was immeasurably fast, incomparably fast. All the capitalist countries were afraid. They were convinced that this system could be fought everywhere. And then began the war against communism. The Second World War was against the Soviet Union. The West has attacked Hitler
Soviet Union. This was not Hitler alone. Now everyone says Stalin is to blame. This is also an ideological lie. Practically the West was to blame for this war. The West has done everything to direct Hitler against the Soviet Union. Before the war, after the war and in the war.
The development of the Soviet Union today is the result not only of internal development, but also a result of the relations between the Soviet Union and the West. The Cold War was a real war, no less than World War II. The Soviet Union was defeated. This situation is not simply the crisis of communism. This is the destruction of communism, from within, but from the outside as well.
The development was complex. On the one hand, the ideological work under Suslow (under Breschnew for ideology, the Red) was immensely strong. But at the same time the Soviet ideology, the Marxist foundation, was abandoned. Formally, the Soviet ideology was Marxist-Leninist. Only in words, assertions, etc. But, indeed, the Soviet ideology had already lost its Marxist-Leninist foundation. And that was one of the conditions of today's crisis.
The crisis existed even in the 1960s. It did not begin in the economy, but first in the ideology and in the moral state of the higher classes. How to say in Russian: A fish starts to stink at the head.
But in the present situation in the Soviet Union, the people like Gorbachev, Shevardnadze, Yeltsin, Yakovlev, Sobchak, etc., are guilty. This is the result of their activity. They are criminals. I am sure that future generations will condemn these people mercilessly.
These perestroika people now have only fear for their own skin. They have betrayed our country and our people. If it is possible to keep their position, they are ready to sell the land. Practically they play the role of a 5th column of the West.
I am not a communist. I say this only as a scientist. This is the result of my scientific research.
The conversation was conducted by Dorothea Jauernig in 1991.
rotefahne.mlpd.de
Julian Wood
You know, since then the USSR collapsed, we had the soviet archives partially opened, and genuine historical work has begone on assessing the era. This is not to say that there isn't any capitalist propaganda on the USSR – far from it – but that maybe you should do better than quoting a man accepting a then living statesman at face value.
Stalin had liquidation quotas in place in freaking 1937 (not to mention the purging of the party) under which party leaders of the specific regions were obliged to kill 2000-3500 people a month, labeling them from ridiculous "Trotskyite traitors" to enemy spies – whatever. The impotence of the Stalinist regime: industrialization, yes, communism, no.
Joseph Garcia
Archives were already mentioned in another post, learn to read dipshit.
cercec.fr
Aaron Powell
they are retarded
Luis Cooper
I've read this before. I don't think this is the point (rational) historians make. The point is that Stalin and his friends ignored all information given to them, going so far as to arrest anyone who dared inform them how terrible the harvest was under the context of being a "counter-revolutionary". What they did is bury their head in the sand. Instead of admitting in front of the international community they had made a mess of collectivization (which is what all the Bolsheviks Stalin purged or later purged insisted over and over would happen), they ignored it and let millions starve to death.
There isn't really any excuse for this. It was poor leadership, and it's an ample example of how the Soviet Union had lost its proletarian character way earlier than when the "revisionist" took over.
Colton Murphy
Terror in itself isn't a problem, you should know this posting under marxflag.
marxists.org
I'm on a phone.
rude
Thomas Davis
There was no necessity to what happen. It was carelessness pointed out by despots. We aren't talking about the "red terror", which was decentralized to an extent. We are talking about crimes carried out by carless despotic regimes that led to the deaths of millions - all for nothing. This isn't what Marx meant, and justifying tragedies with by cheerypicking one of Marx's periodicals is exactly what I'd expect from a tankie :).
Mason Thompson
Committed no worse crimes than any other Western Superpower. But they are afforded the luxury of saying they were 'regrettable mistakes' rather than part of liberal ideology.
Cameron Rivera
Would any Stalinist care to shed some light on the mass rapes that happened during the sacking of Berlin by the Soviets in 1945? I could believe that it's a western fabrication or exaggeration, but I'm going to need some hard evidence for that.
Evan Jones
He did them for a logical reason which was state progress instead of some dumb shit like eugenics.
William Wright
That's not how the nomenklatura worked, though. It wasn't Stalin personally liquidating every naysayer and I wouldn't call regional party leaders his friends either: he liquidated them on a whim. After he himself raised liquidation quotas on a specific area, the leaders were expected to fulfill them, just so a year later Stalin could free the people later from these "tyrants." The blame trickled down and nobody was safe. Total disaster.
How is pointing out what Marx thought about terror "cherry picking" in your book?
Here's another: "there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror."
marxists.org
"Now, since the state is merely a transitional institution of which use is made in the struggle, in the revolution, to keep down one’s enemies by force, it is utter nonsense to speak of a free people’s state; so long as the proletariat still makes use of the state, it makes use of it, not for the purpose of freedom, but of keeping down its enemies and, as soon as there can be any question of freedom, the state as such ceases to exist."
marxists.org
I see no ambiguity.
Elijah Cox
I can imagine all too well the tremendous hatred the Soviets must have felt for the Germans after marching back through 1000 miles of their homeland burned to ash and subjected to attempted genocide. I do not believe treating the Germans kindly was something anyone in the Red Army truly cared about at that point, except perhaps to the degree that they valued military cohesion and order.
Hudson Gray
I never said that it was just Stalin doing X or Y. That's a reductionist view of history. What you can say however is that the period we refer to as "Stalinism" (where Stalin had a great amount of social pull as evidenced by the cult of personality that was built up around him) engaged in repression and carelessness. What I was specifically referring to was a December 1942 decree that denounced most officials and framers trying to explain to the Politburo that the harvest was no good as counterrevolutionaries.
Anyway, I don't mean that the State isn't free to engage in terror. But the application of what Marx is saying depends on context. Russia (which is where socialism was being built) was dealing with a mostly peasant base as opposed to the mostly proletarian base Marx is assuming exist in these letters. I do not believe that there was any point during the "Stalinist" era where the State had a proletarian character. As far as I'm concerned, the command economy embodied the national capitalist Marx and Engels talked about which could theoretically be formed due to centralization. I also prefer to give Marx more credit, and not capitulate to Kola's claim that Marx crafted an ideology so terrible, it was only useful for a terrorist state. The point of collectivization was for Russia to reach modern agriculture. There were many committed Marxist who saw the disaster of collectivization coming from miles away. Of course, all these Marxist were later murdered. Regardless, collectivization was poorly handled
Jason Taylor
Inner monologue much?
Xavier King
No. You said I was saying that Stalinist terror was Stalin eating babies. I explained what I meant. Then I said in regards to the other two post, that I don't think Marx meant that anyone calling themselves a communist can murder as many people as he wants which is what you are implying. I like to give him more credit than that.
Liam Anderson
Are we in the same thread, my god? Read my posts. Watch that webm alone if you are lazy:
Luis Hall
i don't, i don't watch tv
Brayden Perry
Well, what were you trying to say with the Marx quotes then? Why can't the terror be a problem if it accomplishes nothing?
Zachary Watson
The point when I realized I'm debating a troll or an idiot.
Jaxson Sullivan
After what the nazis did to the Russians the Ruskis would have been totally justified burning Germany down and salting the earth. Anybody who cries over disorganized acts of revenge against a state which had just attempted organized mass slaughter is a fool.
David Adams
whoop,s shitposting flag
Jace James
A celebrity of the time makes an appeal to character, please throw in garbage.
Elijah James
So why do you have an issue with me condemning the terror of Stalin or Mao? How did either of them further revolution? If you agree they didn't, why make a point of posting the Marx quotes in the first place.
Caleb Peterson
Don't care lol
Hudson Thomas
Not tankies. Not Stalin's. Not atrocities.
People like this is the reason why I came to conclusion, that I shouldn't actually care if Stalin killed 1000 gorillion people.
Newspeak detected.
Ministry of Truth type of history.
Quotas were maximum. Central authorities set a number of people locals were allowed to prosecute extralegally, to keep things controlled. This was stated very explicitly, allowing no room for misunderstanding. And yet "unbiased" historians keep on keeping on with the same Cold War propaganda, currently being labelled as "genuine" historical work.
Oliver Young
Not a Stalinist, just a historian. This one is likely bullshit. The numbers come from abortion records. But abortion was illegal in Germany unless a woman was raped by a non German (A law kept in place by all 4 occupying powers). In the aftermath of war nobody could afford kids and lying about being raped was only way out. The error in these records can be demonstrated by the massive number of rapes in abortion records reported by African/African American troops in the western occupied territories (but for some reason none among the mostly Germanic white western soldiers, and despite that an accusation of rape resulted in summary execution of African American soldiers but no punishment for white American soldiers).
That's not to say there was no rape, something thousands were reported to authorities, and many must have gone unreported given that jack fucking shit was done by said authorities. This is true of all occupying forces, with the slight variation that Americans shot black soldiers accused of rape regardless of any evidence.
Asher Sullivan
Proofs anywhere? I'd like to know this for sure.
Leo Jackson
Just in case anyone's wondering what the sign actually says, it's "Please do not dump trash here."
Liam King
Well, I'm not sure what is a trustworthy source for you (all pro-Soviet historians are discredited by default), so I'm going to do the dumb thing and use 1984-perdia (and point you towards primary source).
Primary source is the NKVD Order No. 00447 - it specified how Purges are to be carried out. For some reason, article hadn't gotten purged so I'll rely on it:
en.wikipedia.org
> The order also set upper quotas per territory and category of social classes (proletariat, peasant, kulak, bourgeois, others).
In the article there is also a link to full the (Russian) text of the order. You can translate the whole of it, but you need point II.3 - it clearly states that given numbers cannot be exceeded without permission, while lowering numbers is allowed.
Original text:
Google-translate:
Bing-translate:
Jace Ward
I don't care if you care about how many people "Stalin killed". I care about the failure of the USSR because I am a socialist. This did involve the deaths of millions of people, the reason this is particularly a problem is because it brought the world no closer to socialism.
Also, quote the full article:
Connor Long
Never happened and besides, they were kulaks anyway