What is your opinion of Joseph Stalin?
What is your opinion of Joseph Stalin?
I believe in socialism, but I feel Stalin shouldn't be idolised due to things like the Gulag.
I would like more people to become socialist, but I feel not condemning Stalin doesn't help the cause.
I've tried to have a constructieve conversation about this, but I basically get angry comments calling me stupid for believing he did atrocious things.
That's not how you win someone over.
I struggle to believe the Gulag etc. Never happened, and if it happened I firmly believe Stalin should be condemned.
He killed communists and became the poster boy of red scare, hurting the progress of socialism by decades
he was s power hungry megalomaniac that felt no shame in killing anyone who crossed him
When you get your politics from Marvel movies
For starters, "Gulag" just means "prison." Of course prisons existed in the USSR, and some had rather brutal conditions. Others, however, did not, and treated prisoners better to much better than your average American prison. Nobody is saying the Gulags never existed, perhaps they mean your specific interpretation of the conditions of gulags and the extent to which they were used. Edit 1
As for Stalin himself, it's fair to say he committed a fair degree of errors in judgement, had reactionary social views such as his view of homosexuality, was frequently paranoid, and so forth. At the same time, it is equally fair to understand that Stalin has been the subject of countless lies, exaggerations, myths, and other degrees of Cold War propaganda we learn as fact despite evidence to the contrary, especially following the opening of the Soviet Archives. Moreover, it is necessary to acknowledge the vital role he played in governing the worlds first Socialist State, and building the foundations of this rapid improvement on the utter squalor of the Tsarist regime.
Should Stalin be idolized? I don't think so, as I believe that can get in the way of accurate analysis. Should Stalin be villianized and made a scapegoat to brush the Red Scare under the rug? I don't believe so, either. The USSR came with countless benefits, from a doubling of life expectancy to free healthcare to near 100% literacy rates (better than the modern US), and more. These benefits were formed under Stalin, and as such we must do our absolute best to separate fact from fiction. If we accept and push purely the accepted bourgeois narrative regarding the real experience of AES states, then we cannot learn from them properly and sort out what worked and what did not.
Basically, Stalin was neither a perfect saint devoid of mistakes nor a unique monster that should be especially condemned. He was the leader of the USSR, but did not have absolute control, and in addition was in many ways less monstrous than contemporary leaders such as Hitler and Churchill. Correct contextualization is important. I highly recommend the short, 8 minute article "Tankies" by Roderic Day, hosted over on Red Sails. For more in-depth reading, Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend by Domenico Losurdo is a good historical critique of Stalin that focuses on taking a critical stance towards Stalin and contextualizes him.
Edit 1: seeing your other two comments, I am now entirely certain that this is the case.
As always, I have a book that I wish to quote from, but I cannot choose which parts, so I'll just point to Russian Justice if anyone is interested.
For a shorter read see Chapter 14 in This Soviet World
Excellent work, comrade 🫡
I think you hit the nail on the head with this comment. Stalin was a very influential man who shaped large part of the 20th century. Villanizing or idolizong his achievements without acknowledging the other side of the coin would be having an incorrect outlook on him.
I took a quick read of the link describing tankies. It more or less echoes what you said. That being said my observation of the use of the word tankie doesn't fall in line with what the author was talking about. I've seen it used primarily for people who staunchly or blindly defend figures like Stalin and are incapable of acknowledging any criticisms of said figures. What yoyre describing is more of a lefty or a socialist in my opinion. The article was written in 2020 so maybe the use of the word has evolved over time. I haven't been familiar with the word for that long to say otherwise.
Regarding the term "tankie," I actually disagree with what you're saying here. The term "tankie" is described to mean what you say, but the term is applied to people with the same analysis as myself, Roderic Day, and others who defend AES. I've even seen Anarchists labeled "tankie." The reason the word "tankie" is used is because it allows the thrower to terminate the conversation and misrepresent the accused as having all of the blind, dogmatic sins the term itself has been associated with, regardless of the actual bearings of the conversation at play.
The quantity of people who actually fit the term "tankie" is miniscule compared to the quantity the word is thrown at with regularity.
Thanks, this is the kind of response I was looking for. I'll look into what you said further.
With the image that Stalin has in the west, I think it alienates people when he's not condemned. I can't think of a singe leader that we should praise (Mandela maybe?) if anything we should praise ideas not people.
If you don't directly challenge false, bourgeois narratives, then they are used as ammo against related subjects. "Stalin was a butcher of 100 million," if accepted, means the Soviet Union was a horrible failure as well. This means Socialism was a horrible failure in the Soviet Union. This cascading power of bourgeois narratives prevents real radicalization, and moreover allows repitition of failures if not properly analyzed.
Take another example. Stalin synthesized Marxism-Leninism. As a Marxist-Leninist, there is no avoiding Stalin when talking with liberals. Because of my belief that Marxism-Leninism is correct, I cannot avoid the topic of grappling with Stalin's existence.
As Marx said, "The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living."
You are factually incorrect in the very first statement. "Gulag" means "главное управление исправительно-трудовых лагерей" and is a name of a state agency directly operating a network of concentration/forced labor camps. Each of the camps had their name, control and command structures and operated under direct oversight of some best Stalin's chaps.
Also, it wasn't just 'prison'. Each of them was a concentration camp for politically it otherwise unsound elements, that provided Stalin with supply of free slave labor.
Also, it wasn’t just ‘prison’. Each of them was a concentration camp for politically it otherwise unsound elements
"It wasn't a prison! It was [definition of prison]"
I'll direct you to @[email protected] in his comment here going over the Soviet prison system, along with myth-dispelling surrounding the Soviet prison labor system.
He is an ambiguous person. He certainly did a lot of good things, but there were mistakes and even from our point of view, quite cruel decisions. It is difficult to assess why he made certain decisions. There is a lot of unconfirmed information and ambiguous accusations around him, although, of course, there are bad decisions, maybe we don't know all the information, or maybe he was wrong. It was a difficult time back then. According to some reports, at the end of his life, even Lenin treated him ambiguously and was afraid of the concentration of power in one hand and even wrote a letter to the congress, but some doubt this, so it may not be true. To truly understand this, you need to be a historian and read a lot of original documents by yourself. But I don't think that we should consider him only a complete villain, as he is often exposed.
Regarding Lenin, he specifically had beef with Stalin over his rude treatment of Lenin's wife, and wished someone would replace him who was in all manner the same except kinder. Ie, Lenin fully backed Stalin's positions, theoretical understanding, etc and wished he was simply a kinder person towards comrades when interacting with them.
Stalin tried to resign over this, and his resignation was rejected.
For further reading: Archival evidence and records show he tried to resign no fewer than four times, all rejected.
From my limited understanding Stalin tried to change things too fast. A comparison that would piss everyone off is like Elon Musk going all-in on robotics in an underdeveloped country.
In the long term Stalins policies paid off, but a lot of people starved because as it turns out putting all your points in technology means you don't have farms.
Gulagging bourgeoisie also isn't bad per se. But Stalin definitely sacraficed innocent people in the crossfire.
From what I understand, people who were sent to Gulag mostly were Nazis, bourgeoisie (basically people like the UnitedHealthcare CEO) and counter-revolutionaries.
I'm not saying it was the best way to seize resources from the rich and prevent counter-revolution. Some of the things he did were good, and some were bad.
How do you define what a Nazi is?
Do counter revolutionaries deserve to be sent to worker camps where the conditions are so bad many die?
"Send people who don't agree with my world view to worker camps" Doesn't feel like a good thing
How do you define what a Nazi is?
Are you part of the Canadian parliament, per chance?
Wasn't Stalin a communist dictator? We aren't looking for communism or a dictatorship. Claiming otherwise is just misleading.
That is cold war / anti-communist propaganda, which capitalists and the media that they own will never stop propagating, because capitalists are definitionally anti-communist.
Even in Stalin's time there was collective leadership. The western idea of a dictator within the communist setup is exaggerated. Misunderstandings on that subject are caused by lack of comprehension of the real nature and organization of the Communist power structure. Stalin, although holding wide powers, was merely the captain of a team and it seems obvious that Khrushchev will be the new captain.
Second Thought: We Need To Talk About "Authoritarianism"
Stalin was a Communist leader of the USSR. He was not a dictator according to the CIA. Moreover, the idea that Socialists do not seek Communism is a bit strange, the two most major camps of Socialism are Marxism and Anarchism, neither of which has "Socialism" as an end goal. Anarchists seek direct implementations of full horizontalism and decentralization out of the shell of the old, so to speak, while Marxists seek full public ownership and central planning, ie they wish to implement Communism.
The idea of a stagnant, static, never-changing system is foreign to the overwhelming majority of Socialist ideologies, ergo it must continue to advance. This advancement in my opinion is of course going to be Communism.
Finally, the hammer and sickle is the symbol of Marxism-Leninism and the Soviet Union, which is used as the symbol for this community. You yourself do not need to support them, but using the term we in doing so is silly.
I call myself a socialist but do not support a full horizontalism or full decentralization. I support partials of both.
I do believe that optimizations for quality of life and value and stability are rarely at the ends of the spectrums, but sometimes somewhere in the middle and subjective to democratic agreement and changing based on reality.
I want my system to be flexible to have times of more centralization, times of decentralization, times of horizontality, times of independent nodes, etc.
Not worthy of his role. Not nearly smart enough, surely not intellectually honest enough to reject a lifelong position of leadership as a mean to pursue world equality.
Somebody Lenin himself did not want to see in that position.
This is ahistorical.
First, Stalin evidently was intelligent. He wasn't a genius, but he was consistently proven to know what he was talking about. See his interview with H.G. Wells.
Secondly, Stalin did try to reject his position, even desiring to have his position itself permanently liquidated. Archival evidence and records show he tried to resign no fewer than four times, all rejected.
Thirdly, there is no actual evidence that Lenin was opposed to Stalin, the anger Lenin felt towards Stalin towards the end of his life was due to Stalin's treatment of Lenin's wife. Additionally, Stalin was democratically elected, the Soviet Union was not a monarchy. Regardless of who Lenin may have wished to succeed him, Stalin was elected, and furthermore one of his attempted resignation attempts was over this spat with Lenin over treatment of his wife in Lenin's final days (which, again, was rejected).
Stalin was no saint, he made numerous mistakes and was frequently socially reactionary, but it is important to place him in a correct historical context and separate fact from fiction. Moreover, you offer no indication how someone replacing him would help "pursue world equality," whatever that means. Marxism to begin with rails against the idea of equalitarianism, prefering the concept of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his work," and eventually substituting "work" with "needs" as the productive forces become capable of accomodating such organization.
That was my opinion according to the sources I have been exposed to. I'm glad to deepen my understanding on the matter, I'll just point out that in the history of mankind most leader pushed to stay in power, when they were meant to step down, and stayed in power when the choice was purely up to them.
Isn't it weird that the rejections were unanimous? Don't you think there may have been a certain, I don't know... Hesitation into suggesting they found the head of state not fit for the role?
As I said, I'll look better into it, but I am not currently convinced Stalin was an exception to the trend that affected most of the highest ruling class through history.