I'm pretty uneducated on the argument, and I know you guys know how hard it is tohave an unbiased view on this matter

I'm pretty uneducated on the argument, and I know you guys know how hard it is tohave an unbiased view on this matter.
I really don't know how I should feel about Stalin and the USSR experience. On one hand, although they are usually exagerated, his crimes are ethically unacceptable, on the other hand I don't know how could one possibly reconcile ethics with what happened in the USSR. Nazi invasion, opposition and sabotage from the West, an ideology that lends itself a bit too much to sectarianism: how can one possibly deal with all this mess, while actually improving the country, without having to costantly take major ethical compromises? If I disqualify Stalin for his crimes, I'm disqualifying every possible future revolution, for history has shown costantly that no bloodless revolution is possible (but of course, openly admitting that would be political suicide).

What is your genuine opinion on the topic?

The demand that the opponents of capitalism behave perfectly ethical and moral, while capitalism murders and kills and rape everywhere and everyone, is ridiculous.
I see no reason to have to dismiss something because it has bad aspects. We should definitely learn from it and try to avoid the bad parts, but discrediting its entirety for part of it is stupid.

Imagine if neoreactionaries used Napoleon as an argument against Republicanism. It's just fucking stupid.

All Bolsheviks themselves knew that the Soviet Union will experience the similar instance of French Termidor.

Stalin became the leader during this transition. His brutality was also caused by the anarchy in the Communist party since Lenin's death. In order to have a functional state, you have to have a functional and compliant administration. To build it top-down, you had to employ repressions.

Ultimately, his inability to create a system that allowed to renew administration and keep it meritocratic and focused on people's needs caused the collapse of the SU. Could someone else do better? That we'll never know.

Don't try to apply moral values to Stalin. He sure as hell didn't. If you mean ethics in the sense that his actions could be categorized according to how they might have been expected to either help or hinder the cause of communism then Stalin was indeed a mixed bag. His economic programs, effective as they were, put the lie to the notion that the USSR had a dictatorship of the proletariat. Whether or not you think that he did the right thing, I think, ultimately comes down to the question of whether you believe that the Soviet Union could have survived the inevitable invasion by a major capitalist power without the measures that he took. That is an argument that could go either way.

DotP existed under Stalin though. Workers had the full power to criticize, demote, and even sometimes imprison their bosses, and there are records of this happening.

That isnt DotP though. DoTP requires full power of the proletariat over the state and economy.

"feeling" anything about historical figures is a waste of time

know their actions, their motivations for their actions, and the reasons they valued those motivations, yes, and even use them as examples for the consequences of their actions, motivations, and reasoning, but squaring someone away as "good" or "bad" is not only unproductive but counterproductive

I don't know about OP, but Im in need of a good opinion on the U.S.S.R, whenever it comes up on Holla Forums I'm pants on head clueless.

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What was the motivation for the holocaust? Wouldn't it make more sense to enslave the jews than simply exterminate them? Was Hitler really just stupid?

It would make more sense to keep them as a permanent underclass to be exploited and scapegoated forever. Nazis were fucking idiots

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No hitler enslaved the other european peoples for that. He wanted an ethnically pure people so they couldnt have inconvenient half-bloods resulting from horny germans.

They only started exterminating the Jews when it seemed like they might lose. Slaves remain alive to be freed. Besides, they already had tons of Slavic slaves anyway.

You certainly are, considering the smugness with which you spread misinformed cliches. If he'd done otherwise you'd be sitting here saying,

very good question, and infinitely more useful than blindly following the chain of "reasoning" of holocaust bad -> hitler bad -> everything hitler liked bad

hitler ultimately hated the jews enough to not only subjugate them but also to prioritize their destruction even over his claimed interest, the "german people". why did he do so? what material or cultural circumstances lead him to the conclusion that the genocide of the Jews was so important?

but no one in our culture is willing to do these things because they're afraid looking at people as individuals rather than manifestations of Good or Bad is to undermine Good or to build Bad.

It's still a relevant opinion, for, as a leftist, you will be questioned costantly on what you think about the USSR. If anything is one of those opinions that every leftist should figure out.

TBH i realize Stalin wasnt the greatest but, why was collectivizing the Kulaks so bad? they were private landlords, wouldn't any socialist literally do the same?

This

This is a pretty tough question, one I struggle with too.

On the one hand, I think we shouldn't defend Stalin that much since it alienates a lot of people from our movement who would otherwise be socialist.

On the other hand, people are more afraid of revolutionary change because they all think it will end up like Stalin. Equating Nazism with communism is also a trick used to scare people away from communism. Some retards even make the case that the USSR was morally worse than the Nazis just because it killed more people.

I think we shouldn't defend Stalin or the USSR in public party propaganda for instance. But we should learn dedicated party members about the conditions which the USSR faced. Then they can make up their mind about Stalin themselves.

Personally, I think that Stalin made excessive deaths that were not necessary. He was certainly paranoid which increased the number of innocents killed. The problem with revolutionary situations is that when you already cross the line of killing people, the hesitation to kill more is less than people would have normally. However, I do think that the murdering of kulaks was inevitable. The USSR expected farming to undergo the same process as factories under capitalism (NEP): centralization and mass production, as that was what happened in factories, they expected it to happen it to agriculture too. This would make it very easy to collectivize and centralize. But that didn't happen unfortunately.

The only thing I sometimes doubt: are the deaths really worth the progress? I don't believe in historical inevitability to be honest and I do think that we should always take into account that we might not be right about things. Is killing so many people really worth our cause? In any country were revolution will happen, there is almost certainly a part (lets say, 5%) that would prefer capitalism. That would be so many deaths. On the other hand, the structural poverty of present society also kills a lot of people, as does imperialism, which added up probably kills more people than our cause would.

It's tough…

It doesn't matter If Stalin was a good guy or not, the Western propaganda has smeared pretty much all 20th century Socialist experiments beyond saving. Its just not useful for us as leftist to continue to defend the USSR, Maos China, DPKR, etc. To most normal people (at least in the West) they are oppressive shitholes, and there is really nothing we can do th change that. We should take what is useful, learn about them, and give them an honest examination, but when it comes to "defending" people like Stalin, we should just give up.

Also: He was brutal as fuck, but he held the country together through WWII and industrialized the country crazy fast so thats pretty cool.