Ranking soviet leaders

Lenin
[power gap]
Stalin
[massive power gap]
Andropov
[power gap]
Khrushchev
Brezhnev
Chernenko
Gorbachev

actually maybe add another power gap between Khrushchev and Brezhnev.

You are hurting me
We could've had a non-aligned democratic socialist state but he had to ruin it because of "muh Warsaw pact and Eastern-European quasi-imperialism"

Best: Lenin

Worst: etc.

I wonder what Uncle Joe would've had to say about what you guys were doing

Lenin
[Drop]
Stalin
[Drop so hard it didnt fit this post anymore]

hey friendos can someone give me a brief run down of what each leader did and they believed?

I don't like Khrushchev's intervention in Hungary either, but I honestly doubt any of the other leaders in the list (besides maybe Lenin) would have done it differently given the vested interests the USSR had geopolitically. He was still up pretty high on the list because, even though he was an ineffectual oaf in most respects while working as the Soviet General Secretary, it seems to me that he honestly thought he was doing what was best for the time (and minus the market reforms, there are aspects of his programs that were actually quite admirable).

When I put the power gap in there too, I really did mean to say that Lenin was among the only ones listed that I have any real admiration for. From there you go on to people with quite contentious historical legacies (Stalin and Khrushchev, albeit for very different reasons), weren't in office long enough to do anything meaningful (Andropov, Chernenko), or were outright awful in almost every respect (Brezhnev, Gorbachev; probably could have been listed under another power gap).

Lenin
[power gap]
Stalin
[power gap]
Andropov
Khrushchev
[power gap]
everyone else

1. Gorbachev
2. Stalin
3. Lenin
4. Khrushchev
5. Brezhnev
6. Andropov
7. Chernenko
8. Kerensky

This is bait.

Stalin was simultaneously the worst and the best. Khruschev, similarly, was quite bad and quite good.

Both leaders were passionate counterrevolutionaries who ripped the Soviet experiment away from its Marxists foundations while also improving the lives of Soviet citizens greatly from a bourgeois perspective.

no

it is just my impression of each leader's kill count

How come the USSR was such a godawful dystopia, anyway? Is there a rational explanation?

Why is kerensky on the graph at all? He was the head of the provisional government in defiance of the soviet.

Slavs are naturally miserable people.

Khrushchev > all the others

It wasn't. You're living in a dystopia right now and you've been brainwashed to hate any alternative.

...

Pussy.

Now you're lashing out aggressively because your world view has been threatened.

W E W
E
W

Stop proving my point in

costanza.jpg
Get a load of this guy!

You must be one of the new arrivals from reddit.com

Lenin: I like what he was trying to do, and how he did it. NEP was necessary, fite me armchairists.
MASSIVE FUCKING POWER GAP
Cornman: I like what he was trying to do, but not how he did it. While his market reforms eventually led to the collapse, and while 1956 was unjustified, it does seem like he genuinely was trying to make the USSR not just equal, but better than the West.
MASSIVE FUCKING POWER GAP
Stalin: He turned a feudal state into a superpower. On a sea of corpses. There could have been far fewer corpses.
MASSIVE FUCKING POWER GAP
Everyone else.

I've been here for years. Reminder that all the oldfags (mainly ancoms, which have always been the largest group) opposed the anti-imperialism bans, which smelled of r/communism.

the workers >>>>> Lenin = Khrushchyov = Stalin = Andropov = Brezhnev = Chernenko = Malenkov = Trotsky = trash

Literally every other leader was a fucking good for the first place instead of Mikhail "a pizza for my kingdom" Gorbachev. Also his kill count is worse than stalin's with his fucking economic policies, so your argoument is trash.
Yeah and he destroyed the fucking country.
Same goes for yugoslavia. Tito killed a lot of people in Italy for the foibes is considered worse than stalin. Guess what happened when tito died?
Historically there is proof that you need killings to make things work

I need to get redpilled on this guy. Quick rundown pls?

What does any of this have to do with the USSR?

I never said either of those things. What I said is that you have a weird emotional attachment to the USSR. Did you lack a father figure as a child? Is this why you always think in terms of "USSR is great and perfect, and if you say anything to the contrary, you're an imperialist/Trotskyite fascist wrecker/anarkiddie/[generic snarl word for 'irredeemably bad other side']!"? Is this how you end up unironically supporting ultra-capitalists like Putin and Xi?

He said I was from Reddit, I pointed out the reality of things.

No, you only muddle reality by equating the USSR with BO's autistic sperg out. If you are an oldfag then you should have learned that none of this petty mod bullshit matters years ago.

No you fuck, just not Gorbachev. That's my point. Just not him.

Lenin said a lot of great things but did the opposite of them in order to keep the only socialist State running and, in the process, mortally wounded socialism. He was really counting on the revolution spreading to the rest of Europe, or at the very least, to Germany, then the world's most industrialized country. Once that was out of the picture, he saw himself in a position he hoped he wouldn't be: in charge of a miserable, agrarian country, lacking any material base for socialism. Thus, the betrayed ideals and broken promises, and the birth of an authoritarian State needed to control the catastrophe that was Russia at the tim. He became a monster in order to fight monsters, and was denied a chance at redemption by a freak health condition.

Stalin saw the monstrous engine that Lenin built, and rather than dismantle it and build socialism, he took it and cranked it up to 11 Authoritarian measures enacted desperately by Lenin to secure the revolution were further built upon until Stalin was atop a totalitarian abomination responsible for millions of deaths. On the other hand, he managed to turn a poor, immense country into an industrial power in roughly 15 years, which is absolutely unique in history. The issue is, how much of the human cost incurred was necessary – as happens in every industrialization – and how much was due to Stalin's paranoid excesses. In the end, the industrialization saved the USSR from Nazism, but again, it's arguable whether Nazism would have reached power if talin had pursued world revolution. It's hard to judge hypotheticals.

Krushchev, despite having a lot of blood on his hands, had good intentions while in power and did try to humanize socialism, but he didn't have Stalin's guile and political acumen. He constantly ran into conflicts with bureaucrats who didn't want to lose power, and he definitely didn't strike fear into them like Stalin did. I recall that he said something to Castro about how difficult it was to enact change in the USSR, via a weird metaphor involving "a tub full of dough". The attempted reforms slowly eroded his power within the party until he got couped.

Brezhnev was flat-out an incompetent idiot that shouldn't be trusted to run a hot dog stand.

Dunno about Andropov and Chernenko. A couple of guys said a few weeks ago that Andropov was starting a very promising reform to fix socialism, but was obviously cut short. One of them cited a book called Socialism Betrayed as a source, I haven't read it yet.

Gorbachev: see Brezhnev.

See above.

Stalin > Lenin
rest is irrelevant, all shit

BO never did any of this dumb stuff until after the hack. The worst which happened before was the "transphobia ban" mod, who (to their credit) did apologize, but should have stepped down. This was a taste of BO's BS to come. First it was the migration bullshit, then it was the bans on "unironic Nazbols" (complete opposite of them myself, but I don't see a point in banning them - they're mostly former Holla Forumsacks who still have disagreeable views and haven't read much, but frequently argue in good faith), now this "anti-imperialism" ordeal. Something has changed, and I don't like it.
Where did I do that?

Last-minute attempt to shut out reformists and restore a Stalinist police state, economy and all.

I see no difference between him and Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchyov, Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko. The policies implemented during his time in power did accelerate the decline and collapse of the USSR (and its admittedly innovative and useful organizational systems), but it was slowly falling apart anyways because of ingrained flaws whose point of no return had been transgressed decades before. What happened when the fall came did kill a lot of people, but to attribute it to one person (even if they are a de facto monarch like the leaders of the USSR) is laughable, no matter who says it.
Why do you automatically assume that any opposition to Soviet leaders is solely on the grounds of them killing lots of people? You make it sound as if you unironically believe that everyone who disagrees with you is the same, which reinforces my earlier points about the mental health of tankies. Did you lack a father figure?

Pretty much this, although there is something to be said for Stalin in that he actually ended the famines which had plagued Russia for close to 1000 years (see: Nikonian Chronicles in 1160 or so, famine of 1689, famine of 1891, many others which I can't remember off the top of my head). It's hard to judge how many people died during Stalin's ruling period because of the policies followed specifically. The rest of the arguments on why he was trash are spot-on, though.
He had a weird didactic view, stemming in no small part from both his own mental problems with people who didn't sycophantically agree with him and from the views of Kautsky and the rest of the Second International (which were in opposition to the views expressed by Marx in the 2nd International). My guess is that he was well-intentioned, but seriously flawed from the start. Arguably the most tragic figure of all time. He should be left to the dustbin of history and moved on from theoretically.
That guy also believed that there was workers' control (as in actual soviet democracy) during Stalin's rule, which is contradicted by almost all non-Soviet sources and even non-state accounts from within. Andropov was a hardcore Stalinist who came from the ranks of the KGB and was their moonshot at preserving state integrity (and themselves by extension).
————-
For all those saying that "Hungary happened under Khrushchiov", it was Molotov (hardline Stalinist) who pushed for intervention and it was Mao (via Liu Shaoqi) who had to pressure Khrushchiov to make the move to intervene.
I'm not supportive of Khrushchiov, but 1956 Hungary's your deal, tankies.

Now this is bait.

Competition against world powers who wished them harm. You can't just curl up into a ball and do communism by yourself when you have neighbors like that

I think that the funny thing is, Lenin's short patience with dissent wasn't due to his ego, but because he couldn't believe someone would dissent to that. It's something I've noticed with really intelligent people. Some things that seem absolutely obvious to them is still being debated among us mortals, so to them, it's like talking to someone who thinks that dropped objects fall upwards. Anyway, bacl to old Vlad. By all accounts, outside of politics, he was the very portrait of humility. But in politics, he definitely didn't tolerate differing opinions in key issues, altho he was more tolerant on the remaining ones; I think the biggest example is the Red Army. It began as an army that only accepted fervorous revolutionary volunteers, and had elected officers and other libertarian traits. Lenin resisted Trotsky's pleas to turn it into a regular army and enact conscription, because he correctly saw the very existance of standing armies as invitations to tyranny and imperialism all throughtout history, so he favored a people's militia. However, he had to relent because, as with everything he did, he had to do it for the socialist State to survive.

I have to agree. Someone here on Holla Forums pointed out to me that double tragedy of his; first becoming a monster, then being denied redemption.

Dunno, I think we should be very careful of dogmatism and not waste time with labels, but we should still study him. That's my interpretation of Zizek's spiel about ideology.

Oh well, so much for that.