MrNobodyWhy do you think so many people on the Marxist left defend Stalinism?
foodandartI would wager it’s as they don’t read actual historical documents of those who witnessed and survived Stalin, is why. Dude was bloody-minded as fuck, and in a tweenaged subset of the population, death, misery and degradations are “cool”.
The political flip side are the right-wing chuds that join ICE so they can tear families apart and “own” the left.
Any recommended reading that isn’t The Gulag Archipelago?
Stalin: After Dark | BEHIND THE BASTARDS
onoira [they/them]you mean the podcast hosted by Robert Evans, the anarchist who writes for Bellingcat which is funded by the anticommunist National Endowment for Democracy which is currently run by former Bush staffers and is a literal CIA front?
In 1986, NED’s President Carl Gershman said that the NED was created because “It would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the CIA. We saw that in the 1960s and that’s why it has been discontinued”.
In a 1991 interview with the Washington Post, NED founder Allen Weinstein said: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”
that ‘anarchist’, who likes to talk over his guests, and his takes on countries outside the US repeatedly mirror the State Department?
as an anarchist, i do wonder if the antistatist who is funded by an anticommunist US government organisation might have a bias…
Off the top of my head, no. (It’s been decades since I’ve thought about any of this, TBH…)
What you can do is branch out and read up on the people he had around him in government, like the Deputy Chair of the Soviet secret police, Lavrentiy Beria. (Now that’s a dark hole to look in to, he was feared more than Stalin.)
Stalin was a thug at heart. Angry and conniving, but surrounded himself with even worse people. (Gee, who can we see as a mirror of that today? Yikes…)
Who he chose to do his bidding, that’s where the full scope of the horror of Stalin can be found.
TonavaThe worst tankie-argument I’ve encountered so far was “well gulags weren’t that bad, only couple millions died”, so I have to agree they haven’t read a single thing about history of those times, but also it seems like there’s something seriously wrong with these types of people just in general
tronSomebody in this thread said Churchill was way worse than Stalin lol. I must have missed the chapter about the English gulags and millioms murdered in them.
Cowbee [he/they]Churchill was largely responsible for starving over 4 million Indians to death, and had this to say to defend himself:
I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits.
On top of this, Churchill was very close with the Nazis, to the point that Hitler was certain Britain would side with the Nazis in the coming war. When FDR and Stalin joked about executing Nazi officers after the war was over, Churchill stormed out of the room, as “those men were defending their country.”
As for the soviet prisons, an enormous number of prison deaths occured during World War II, when famine was widespread due to the Nazis storming Ukraine, the USSR’s breadbasket. On the whole, soviet prisons and the justice system itself were more progressive than their peers, Mary Stevenson Callcott documented it quite well in Russian Justice.
The soviet union, despite having a progressive legal system, was in a state of constant turmoil caused by pressures both external and internal. They couldn’t simply delete all previously existing ruling-class people and ideology, class struggle continues under socialism. Further, pressure from the imperialist west, invasion both in threat and in action, and intentional sabateurs meant that the prisons certainly weren’t empty. The soviet union never had a single year of normal, stable growth, free from intense opposition on the outside and counter-revolutionary forces on the inside.
Flyberius [comrade/them]He had a really big spoon
Could it have anything to do with saving the entire world from the Third Reich by being the leader of the only military that actually stood up and ended the Nazi reign of terror, defeated 80% of the Nazi military, marched all the way to Berlin, and through Berlin, before any allies showed up, and liberated the concentration camps?
No. It’s probably vibes.
Luminous5481 "Lawless Heathen" [they/them]I always enjoy the tankie pivot from being the saviors of mankind to being the victims who couldn’t stand up to western bullying whenever the whim takes them, but I do wonder how you lot don’t get whiplash from the constantly changing narrative.
What are you talking about?
What a daft thing to say.
Talk about a purely emotional analysis. You have no idea how it’s possible to go from winning to losing? Really? That’s just something that’s beyond you? I guess that’s what the commitment to prefigurative idealism does to a mind.
You have no idea how it’s possible to go from winning to losing?
that’s not what I said. but don’t worry, I know you’re not misconstruing what I said, tankies just don’t have reading comprehension. it isn’t your fault you’re an idiot.
the tankie pivot from being the saviors of mankind to being the victims who couldn’t stand up to western bullying
That’s sounds exactly like what you said. You don’t understand how the narrative could be that the USSR won the war to the USSR lost against the West. Maybe you use words differently. I’m open to it. Definitions are unjustified hierarchy. Explain what you mean.
Or, you know, dig in deeper by not having anything of substance to say and just keep trying to win by virtue signalling. That works for your audience, too.
Explain what you mean.
no, I much rather prefer letting you remain in the dark. my words were plain english, if you’re not capable of understanding them then that’s a problem for you, not for me. besides, if I pointed out what you misunderstood, you might stop doing it, and as I said I always enjoy it.
yeah, I didn’t think so.
the best part of your comment chain here is you immediately did exactly what I mentioned. you’re just too fucking stupid to pick up on that, let alone see the irony. for a group that goes on and on about how people should read more theory, I think just reading at all would do you some good.
might I recommend The Very Hungry Caterpillar? its about at your level.
I wish you all the best in your rage-induced commenting spree where you pretend to be smarter than people because they don’t accept your framing. Ta!
if that’s what you need to say to convince yourself you’re not malding because somebody said mean things about your favorite homophobic dictator, then go on.
Stalin didnt do it. The soldiers in the soviet union made that happen. Then after the war The Great Comrade purged a lot of commanders who defeated the nazis. heres a great podcast about him. its one of my favorite episodes.
Stalin: After Dark | BEHIND THE BASTARDS
I love this talking point from anarchists and leftcoms because it lays bare their complete commitment to debate perversion and unwillingness to actually think.
If Stalin didn’t defeat the Nazis, then Hitler didn’t kill Jews, Blacks, Queer folx, Roma, etc, didn’t commit genocide, and didn’t invade anyone. Bush didn’t invade Iraq. bin Laden didn’t attack the US. Truman didn’t save 10k Nazis. Trump didn’t bomb Iran.
But even more so, it also means Stalin didn’t starve anyone, Stalin didn’t imprison anyone, and Stalin didn’t relocate anyone.
This is one of those things that just reveals you for who you are.
Ha Ha Ha HA! Oh wait, you are serious. HA HA HA HA!
oh wait you don’t know any history…
Standing up only after you are betrayed isn’t quite as impressive as standing up because it’s the right thing to do. Soviets would have been happy to sit and do nothing until the Nazis started threatening the Soviets. But, still, yes the Soviets kicked ass
Hitler threatened the USSR over a decade before he invaded. He wrote it in Mein Kampf. It was out in the open. Stalin attempted to get Western Europe to take the threat seriously, but Western European leaders understood that the primary target of the Third Reich was the USSR and they all wanted the Third Reich to win that war. Stalin never believed that the Third Reich would be an ally, and the attempt of people to spin it that way is so intellectually dishonest it boggles the mind.
You can say whatever you want. The fact is the Soviets had a treaty with Nazi Germany and only fought back when forced
Thordros [he/him, comrade/them]I wonder, did any other countries have non-aggression pacts with Germany at the time?
My point is just that the ussr was not some righteous world hero, as was seemingly being alluded to
So did the USSR not defeat 80% of the Nazi military, liberate every territory East of Berlin that the Nazis had captures, capture Berlin, and liberate the concentration camps? Or did they do that but you need to make sure everyone is aware that they only did that to protect themselves and shouldn’t be considered heroes?
I mean, cuz what it sounds like you’re saying is that defeating the Nazis isn’t enough, you actually also have to be morally good according to a standard that you will never admit the USSR into but also could never apply to any country in the history of the world.
Enough for what? Extreme gratitude, yes. But the post is asking why so many people on the left seemingly ignore the faults of the Soviet Union. And no, winning ww2 does not justify turning a blind eye to any fault of the Soviet Union, that’s ridiculous
Seriously. How are you able to say these things without a horn of self awareness. You know what it looks like to enter a war voluntarily? It looks like the US and Israel bombing Iran. It looks like the Third Reich invading every country on the path to Russia. Like what the fuck do you imagine you are saying? The USSR knew that engaging in war with the Third Reich was a necessity as soon as they got a copy of Mein Kampf. It’s such a ridiculous statement to say that because the USSR joined the war out of necessity that therefore it is not appropriate to consider that their defeat of the Nazis was a good thing that the USSR did. Ludicrous.
Most leftists do NOT ignore the flaws of the USSR. In fact, those flaws are studied as part of the process of historical materialism. For example, every leftist knows that Stalin was a violent paranoid control freak. Every leftist knows that the repression of religion was a major mistake. Hell, even the USSR figured that one out and reversed the policy.
If you think leftists ignore the USSR’s faults, that’s on you. But if your problem is actually that you believe the faults of the USSR erase anything good that could possibly be attributed to them, then that’s a different problem and it’s intellectually dishonest to say that the only proper way of acknowledging the flaws of the USSR is to condemn the entire project, denounce it, and never use it as an example of something good. Those positions are not equivalent
They treated with the Nazis precisely because it postponed the threat.
And as freagle said, they tried to fight the Nazis first but couldn’t do so without western cooperation, which was refused. Delaying until ready to fight alone was the second best option.
Then why did they not end the treaty when UK entered the war but when the Nazis invaded the ussr?
Stop. That question assumes way too much. So let’s unpack it and reverse it on you.
Are you saying that ending the treaty when the UK entered the war would indicate to you that the USSR was a righteous ally of good and true humanity but that not ending the treat at that time would indicate to you that they were actually Nazi collaborators or at best willing to let the Nazis take over the entire world as long as they didn’t get attacked (which they knew would happen because again, the Third Reich was abundantly clear that destroying the USSR was its number 1 goal)?
Because if you can think through the answer to that, we can answer your question, which is that the USSR had always known that the UK was not ally, and it knew that because the UK and its allies, including the US, invaded Russia after WW1 to try to stop the communists from forming the USSR. The USSR, however, didn’t think the UK would be so evil as to literally turn a blind eye, and even financially support the fascists.
After the USSR sought to ally with the West to defeat the Nazis and they said “nah”, even you can see that the USSR was completely on its own to survive and the UK entering the war, while the majority of Nazi forces were on the Eastern front, did not change the strategic landscape enough to make the USSR capable of surviving an open conflict with the Third Reich in the fall of 1939.
Between 1939 (UK declaring) and 1941 (USSR declaring), the Red Army quadrupled in size. The idea that the USSR should have just decided to fight in 1939, when it was 25% the size it was when it eventually won is literally the same idea as the USSR should have lost the war but done so while adhering to your definition of morally good. It’s daft.
mathemachristian [he/him]I’m just gonna copy socialism_everyday’s excellent write up they got banned for
The only country who offered to start a collective offensive against the Nazis and to uphold the defense agreement with Czechoslovakia as an alternative to the Munich Betrayal was the USSR. From that Wikipedia article: “The Soviet Union announced its willingness to come to Czechoslovakia’s assistance, provided the Red Army would be able to cross Polish and Romanian territory; both countries refused.” Poland could have literally been saved from Nazi invasion if France and itself had agreed to start a war together against Nazi Germany, but they didn’t want to. By the logic of “invading Poland” being akin to Nazi collaboration, Poland was as imperialist as the Nazis.
As a Spaniard leftist it’s so infuriating when the Soviet Union, the ONLY country in 1936 which actively fought fascism in Europe by sending weapons, tanks and aviation to my homeland in the other side of the continent in the Spanish civil war against fascism, is accused of appeasing the fascists. The Soviets weren’t dumb, they knew the danger and threat of Nazism and worked for the entire decade of the 1930s under the Litvinov Doctrine of Collective Security to enter mutual defense agreements with England, France and Poland, which all refused because they were convinced that the Nazis would honor their own stated purpose of invading the communists in the East. The Soviets went as far as to offer ONE MILLION troops to France (Archive link against paywall) together with tanks, artillery and aviation in 1939 in exchange for a mutual defense agreement, which the French didn’t agree to because of the stated reason. Just from THIS evidence, the Soviets were by far the most antifascist country in Europe throughout the 1930s, you literally won’t find any other country doing any remotely similar efforts to fight Nazism. If you do, please provide evidence.
The invasion of “Poland” is also severely misconstrued. The Soviets didn’t invade what we think of nowadays when we say Poland. They invaded overwhelmingly Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian lands that Poland had previously invaded in 1919. Poland in 1938, a year before the invasion:
“Polish” territories invaded by the USSR in 1939:
The Soviets invaded famously Polish cities such as Lviv (sixth most populous city in modern Ukraine), Pinsk (important city in western Belarus) and Vilnius (capital of freaking modern Lithuania). They only invaded a small chunk of what you’d consider Poland nowadays, and the rest of lands were actually liberated from Polish occupation and returned to the Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian socialist republics. Hopefully you understand the importance of giving Ukrainians back their lands and sovereignty?
Additionally, the Soviets didn’t invade Poland together with the Nazis, they invaded a bit more than two weeks after the Nazi invasion, at a time when the Polish government had already exiled itself and there was no Polish administration. The meaning of this, is that all lands not occupied by Soviet troops, would have been occupied by Nazis. There was no alternative. Polish troops did not resist Soviet occupation but they did resist Nazi invasion. The Soviet occupation effectively protected millions of Slavic peoples like Poles, Ukrainians and Belarusians from the stated aim of Nazis of genociding the Slavic peoples all the way to the Urals.
All in all, my conclusion is: the Soviets were fully aware of the dangers of Nazism and fought against it earlier than anyone (Spanish civil war), spent the entire 30s pushing for an anti-Nazi mutual defence agreement which was refused by France, England and Poland, tried to honour the existing mutual defense agreement with Czechoslovakia which France rejected and Poland didn’t allow (Romania neither but they were fascists so that’s a given), and offered to send a million troops to France’s border with Germany to destroy Nazism but weren’t allowed to do so. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was a tool of postponing the war in a period in which the USSR, a very young country with only 10 years of industrialization behind it since the first 5-year plan in 1929, was growing at a 10% GDP per year rate and needed every moment it could get. I can and do criticise decisions such as the invasion of Finland, but ultimately even the western leaders at the time seem to generally agree with my interpretation:
“In those days the Soviet Government had grave reason to fear that they would be left one-on-one to face the Nazi fury. Stalin took measures which no free democracy could regard otherwise than with distaste. Yet I never doubted myself that his cardinal aim had been to hold the German armies off from Russia for as long as might be” (Paraphrased from Churchill’s December 1944 remarks in the House of Commons.)
“It would be unwise to assume Stalin approves of Hitler’s aggression. Probably the Soviet Government has merely sought a delaying tactic, not wanting to be the next victim. They will have a rude awakening, but they think, at least for now, they can keep the wolf from the door” Franklin D. Roosevelt (President of the United States, 1933–1945), from Harold L. Ickes’s diary entries, early September 1939. Ickes’s diaries are published as The Secret Diary of Harold Ickes.
"One must suppose that the Soviet Government, seeing no immediate prospect of real support from outside, decided to make its own arrangements for self‑defence, however unpalatable such an agreement might appear. We in this House cannot be astonished that a government acting solely on grounds of power politics should take that course” Neville Chamberlain House of Commons Statement, August 24, 1939 (one day after pact’s signing)
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this
“Why is this group so stupid and wrong? No specifics, project your own opinions of stupid and wrong people here.”
rockerface🇺🇦Simply put, they have no idea what they’re talking about.
Stalin took credit for defeating Nazis (after carving up Poland with them first, but who cares about minor historical details) and was leading this big global superpower that could stand up the The Evil West (while also crushing every other leftist organization that didn’t bend the knee, but again, minor details).
And from there it’s a pretty simple leap to the world being divided into the Good Camp and the Bad Camp. The US is clearly in the Bad Camp (which is the part I don’t argue). The USSR was against the US. Therefore it must be the Good Camp. The idea of multiple evil people opposing each other is a bit too complicated for them.
DigitAs I read that, it occurs, perhaps because they simply are not cognizant of, and do not cognise, any other way (e.g. any “freedom respecting” way), only their one true way. Why won’t we just obey? And they keep their totalitarianising level of authoritarianism preventing them from entertaining the ideas, instead only seeing other ideas as threats, and only study them as far as they need to construct the next argument to protect the one true way, that they’ve identified with, and so defend as if their lives (and more) depend on it, obliterating critical, considerate, creative cognition, leaving only social dominance reflex mode…
… could be something like that.
They are basically red-painted conservatives, you could put it that way, yeah
oatscoop
naevaTheRatPop quiz though, how many times did the USSR offer to ally against the Nazis with Poland and who torpedoed that?
Minor historical detail really.
If you mean the non-aggression pact they had, then it would also be the USSR, yes
No I mean when the USSR offered to fight the Nazis with Poland, France and the UK
So… still USSR, represented by Molotov eventually deciding to side with Nazis. Really unsure how it’s Poland’s fault, as you implied previously
That is such a ridiculous take even British historians disagree with you.
Are you interested in understanding history and trying to learn from it?
There were many talks, the British and French governments refused to commit, prefering to let the Nazis kill Slavs. They told the Polish government that despite Hitler loudly saying how he was going to kill Slavs and take their land this would not happen. The USSR said they would fight, first in Czechoslovakia when it was annexed, second when the Nazis were building up forces on Poland’s boarders. Both times they needed permission to send armies through (and later in obvs) Poland.
The polish government, being capitalist shitbags, were terrified of a revolution and denied this. Preferring to take their chances with Hitler and the dubious guarantees of the British. This worked out famously well for them.
The ussr, having been a nation of serfs 20 years ago, and being unable to fight alone abandoned the talks that were being deliberately sabotaged for a NAP to buy time. Literally the same strategy as the UK yet somehow this is an example of the USSR being evil? Despite this being their backup backup plan.
Framing it as the evil USSR carving up Poland with Hitler is not just subtly wrong, it’s almost the opposite of reality.
Oh, my bad, I didn’t recognise Cowbee’s alt
I’m actually db0’s if you check my bio.
Why resort to name calling though? I’ve been only polite and genuine to you.
The only alts I have are ones named “Cowbee” on other instances.
It is okay to be categorically wrong about a historical time period. It wasn’t Molotov in that phase. Molotov replaced Litvinov, who was the foreign minister of the USSR until 1939. Litvinov was the proponent of allying with the West against Germany. (For what it is worth Litvinov likely would’ve signed the Pact with Germany anyway.) But Stalin supported him, and even after being dismissed wasn’t even disgraced.
The important subsequent development here is that Britain and France then actively tried to support Finland against the USSR during the Winter War while still technically at war with Germany, who was also supporting Finland. The Phoney War was a real thing that played out, after all.
Unless these are too minor of details.
I guess that completely justifies occupying half of Poland and murdering a bunch of locals, my bad /s
It doesn’t, and it shouldn’t be taken as such. It’s just historicity.
Pretty much between 1914 and 1946/53 you have an impenetrable web of colonial empires colliding and crashing apart. There is very little purity to be found, so accuracy is about all you can rely on. Not knowing about Litvinov, (or Pilsudski, or the Phoney War, or whatever) is fine and normal.
Like, there are often counter/fingerpointing on this subject about Churchill being a pile of shit (and sure, super racist) but in this specific context we’re still in the Chamberlain era. Pointing that out is neither support for Chamberlain nor a judgement on Churchill.
And there’s plenty about Stalin-era USSR to complain about. Lysenkoism or Beria, for instance. It’s such a deeply complex subject that accuracy tends to be the most damning evidence.
This is the shit that gets to me. Like half this thread is people talking about silly people wanting to divide history into goodies and baddies while doing exactly that.
History just is, the good and bad we must analyse with clear eyes if we are to learn from both the triumphs and failures so we can build a free world.
The USSR did wonderful things, terrible things, and banal things. On the whole it vastly improved the lives of people in it, and even outside of it the threat of revolution was used to advance worker’s rights massively. Acknowledging this is not excusing or justifying the failures, explaining why the failures occured is not excusing them. To learn we must understand the whys and the hows so we can replicate triumphs and avoid tragedy.
The whole point it to do better. I don’t understand why people don’t see that.