The image attached portrays the defence of Stalin as a waste of time at best, this is frankly charitable compared to most self proclaimed leftists who think the rehabilitation of Stalin is actively harmful towards our movement.
There are reasons as to why the rehabilitation of Stalin is indeed an important issue and not just some trivial thing that we must halt in order to gain a larger following.
The rehabilitation of Stalin’s image is less about the rehabilitation of Stalin as a historical individual and more about defending and upholding Marxism.
Condemning or even refusing to uphold Stalin to at least some extent is equivalent to fighting our enemies on their terms. Why would we let our enemies decide who we should love and hate? There’s no reason to allow the historical narrative that our enemies have constructed to be our historical narrative, that’s just ideological surrender, may as well become a liberal at that point.
The total slander and demonization of Stalin’s image is what leads most people into deviationist tendencies, tendencies which are totally harmless towards the bourgeoisie. It’s only logical, if people believe Marxism-Leninism led to practically 1984 in real life, then why would they follow it?
Rather than keeping quiet about the USSR under Stalin, it is our duty to defend this period against the reactionary slander laid upon it. It was the first time in human history that mankind entered the socialist mode of production, and that’s something to be cherished.
I’m not sure I follow the logic here. Wouldn’t it be better to then blame it all on Stalin? Like Stalin did a lot of important things to grow material reality in USSR, but also purges and fundamentally change how and what people accumulated power in the USSR.
Isn’t the issue here: 1. It’s a lost cause from how well publicized Stalin’s crimes are so rather contraproductive to recruit people 2. it requires to whitewash history and suppress history 3. it assumes potential recruits cannot differentiate between the man and the country, lowering expectations 4. it prevents addressing questions on how and who accumulates power, how candidates are filtered and advance towards ultimate power and how to prevent for example sociopaths from claiming ultimate power
Doesn’t any modern communist theory HAVE to include ideas of how to prevent someone like Stalin from gaining power?
Regarding your points:
The “Black Legend” of Stalin is widely publicized, but this isn’t the actual Stalin. Anyone building socialism and communism will be accused of being a “Stalinist” anyways, so it’s better to destroy that hammer than it is to try to dodge it.
Contrary to your belief, rehabilitating Stalin isn’t whitewashing, it’s removing the junk and grime that has been piled onto his name, and the Soviet Union in general. The Stalin that exists in popular notion, the “Black Legend,” is historically inaccurate. We must kill that legend.
Raising consciousness is a long and protracted process. Unfortunately, we cannot simply take this question unseriously, cultural hegemony colors how we view the world.
It does not, actually. Stalin was legitimately elected, popularly supported, and governance was collective in his era. We can analyze the successes and problems with socialist democracy without letting the “Black Legend” of Stalin persist.
We should not be “preventing Stalin,” we should be preventing Khrushchev and Gorbachev, those who undermine socialism and advance their own careerist aims.
The post was directed towards communists, I didn’t expect it to reach non-communists, but nevertheless I’ll answer your questions:
Requires a bit of context, but essentially what I’m saying in that paragraph is that this fear of Stalin and previous socialist experiments leads people to follow nominally socialist ideologies that don’t lead to revolution. Examples include anarchism, libertarian socialism, Trotskyism, democratic socialism, vague Marxism, and on the off-chance small niche ideologies that a dozen people believe. It’s not my fault that our predecessors who achieved proletarian revolution had respect for Stalin.
Putting all the errors of the USSR on the individual of Stalin is not Marxist, it’s practically great man theory. Decisions were carried out by the party, not by a single individual. That being said, it’s not wrong to blame Stalin and his administration for their real errors.
That’s what we call opportunism; short term gains, long term problems. Communists should stand firm on their principles and drag the world leftwards. Changing the narrative is not a lost cause, if it was then may as well abandon communism because most people have been have a hatred towards it.
On the topic of recruiting, if Stalin turns off people from joining Marxist-Leninist organizations, good. We don’t need non-Marxist-Leninists in Marxist-Leninist organizations. non-MLs do have a place though, they can join left mass organizations. There’s also no issue with MLs working with non-MLs, they just don’t belong in an ML organization.
It does require us to deny the claims of cold war pseudo-historians, yes. Such as Robert Conquest, who was affiliated with the Information Research Department, a secret propaganda department of the government of the United Kingdom during the cold war. Not all cold war sovietologists are as egregious as doing the work of a secret propaganda department, but there certainly was an incentive to write pure nonsense. The more negative you wrote, the higher the chance you’d get propelled to the higher echelon of prestige.
Not the right question to ask from a Marxist perspective, as its not the individual of Stalin that matters but the party as a whole. Marxism is in complete contradiction with great man theory; systems are what matters in this world, not individuals. The question should be, “How do we prevent the party from betraying the revolution?”
This is a topic of great importance, as the greatest threat to the revolution are internal as proven by history. Stalin’s solution was the great purge, in my opinion this was not right, it didn’t prevent or even delay the USSR from reversing course to capitalism because it didn’t deal with any root issues but only the surface manifestation. Trotsky’s approach was the permanent revolution, this was also not right as it hinged on Trotsky’s disbelief of the revolutionary potential of the peasantry. Mao and Hoxha’s approach was cultural revolution, though sharing the name had different approach with Mao’s being bottom-up and Hoxha’s being more top-down.
Again, these are the names of the leaders but in truth were the attempts of their respective revolutions to tackle this issue.
Interesting, thanks for the reply. Just FYI I do consider myself a communist.
Are those numbers in dispute or wildly inaccurate?
I don’t see how this didn’t poison the socialist institutions long term. How this isn’t only a crime against humanity, but also a betrayal or crime against socialism. This many people weren’t “too dangerous to be left alive”. This was consolidation of power for Stalin and people helping him. Immediate corruption and terror shaping and deforming socialist practice and ideology.
I do think Stalin deserves respect for industrializing the USSR and defeating Nazi Germany - but he simply CAN’T be rehabilitated.
Anyway, I’ll see myself out.
The number of “executions” is actually the number of sentencing, and we know people were acquitted of the death penalty on numerous occasions. The purges were a genuine response to real infiltration, and were popularly supported.
Regarding the deaths in prisons, a huge portion came from starvation, during World War II when the Nazis took Ukraine, the soviet breadbasket. The soviets were not oppressing people en masse.
“Dekulakization” was the collectivization of agriculture from the hands of petty bourgeois tyrants that often enslaved the peasantry. This was a necessary step forward, and would have been fully peaceful if the kulaks had allowed it to be.
What you are looking at is bourgeois historiography. In actual fact, Stalin was a more collective leader than his successors, such as Khrushchev. Stalin attempted to resign on no fewer than four occasions, and was denied each time. A cult of personality arose around him against his wishes precisely because he successfully solidified socialism in the USSR and helped defeat the Nazis in World War II.
Stalin was on the whole more good than bad, which is why rehabilitating him is not whitewashing. He made mistakes and there was excess, but this is going to be true regardless of who it is building socialism.
In truth, I really do hate speaking on this topic. I really don’t like handwaving human lives like this. The only reason I do this is because it makes people think communism is a force of evil worse than fascism; a sentiment that keeps the bourgeoisie in power, because the alternative is apparently so monstrous that the plunder and impoverishment of the global south, the eternal wars of the world, the destruction of the ecosystem, and the continuation of wage slavery are so so much better.
The vast majority of gulag deaths happened in World War 2 when the supply chains broke down, causing many people to starve.
Indeed those people who died in the great purge weren’t all “too dangerous to be left alive”, the great purge went completely out of hand, there’s no consolation I can give on this topic; some people put the blame entirely on Yezhov, because the VAST majority of deaths happened during Yezhov’s leadership of the NKVD, but again putting blame on individuals like this is not Marxist, it was the fault of the party and the system as a whole at the end of the day.
On deportations, I can’t speak on that or if those numbers are accurate. But think about what “deported during the 1940s” actually means, it means deporting people during World War 2, during the German invasion.
Also, you kind of skipped the next sentence of the Wikipedia article
Why can’t I just say Stalin was a fascist or a traitor like most ‘respectable’ communists in the modern day? Because it just feeds in to a different liberal criticism of communism, which is that it always leads to dictatorship; I don’t accept that premise and you shouldn’t either. The Marxist conception is dictatorship of a class not individual dictatorship, even his biggest hater Trotsky didn’t take Stalin as an individual dictator, but as the reflection of a degenerated worker’s state (though I also don’t accept this either as this is derived from Trotsky’s distrust of the Peasant class). Stalin was a true communist. I suggest you read some of Stalin’s writings, I’ve read quite a bit of them and there’s not that much I disagree with, I don’t think you’d disagree much either as a communist.
I’m obliged to say thought that Stalin is not nearly as important to Marxist theory as Marx, Engels, Lenin, or Mao as he hardly made new additions. But the possibility of Socialism in One Country as formulated by Stalin is to be upholded. In truth, I’m completely fine with people being critical of Stalin as long as they uphold his line (I’m also not posing Stalin’s USSR as sunshine and rainbows as you can tell), but usually people who hate Stalin follow deviationist ideologies like Titoism, Trotskyism, etcetera, etcetera and that’s the core of the original post.
Well, I do think we need new ideas for Communist Theory. It’s not just the lies and propaganda about the USSR, it’s also simply that they collapsed and failed. So what I’m missing is something like “neo-communism” that incorporates new information and communication technology into communism to be more efficient, realtime and democratic. Or advances in psychology to create tests for who may hold leadership. Game theory about how people min-max to achieve power to end up with leaders who are good at gaining and holding onto power, but not at ruling, and countermeasures. Even generative AI could be insanely useful for a communist economy.
But whenever you look into spaces like this, you’re encouraged to read the theory of the “ye olden days”. But in order to refute a hypothesis, you only need to show one counter example of where that hypothesis breaks down. And the USSR did fail. So the theory NEEDS to be fixed, patched, improved. But the few communist spaces I’ve looked into all seem very “conservative” with their ideology. Not that I have much to say on how to do that, besides ideas.
I think something like “how Stalin damaged the USSR and how to prevent it from happening again” would be far more useful to proliferate belief in communism.
The context we are living in rn is kinda the same 100 years ago, nearly everything that is said in the political scene today was first articulated in Europe, What actually changed since was counter revolutionary**** tactics used by the bourgeoisie as it is way more experienced in anti communism, because the class dynamics didn’t change, proletariat are proletariat and bourgeois are bourgeois
It is way more complexed than that, there’s a lot of parameters into it, mainly it was the opening up of khrushchev that let the revolution rot, also it should be noted that the ussr was illegally dismantled,
Imo the ussr existed in a context yes a lot deaths happened (even though none can be proven to be intentional acts of tyranny) but in the same periods capitalism was creating way worse conditions and way worse deaths, black people in the usa were killed because they simply existed, european colonies were intentionally starving and killing indigenous populations, imperial wars and invasions and genocides are to this day committed by imperialist states,
Your conception of “power” fall right inside the liberal pov and fails to understand how the ussr actually works, and what class dictatorship is. If we call a socialist experiment “dictatorship of the proletariat” then anything else than that should be a dictatorship of another class, which is the bourgeoisie, so “power” falls in the hand of a class, not an individual,
Sorry if it sounds mean but your comments lack some maturity about the subjects, you still hold onto the that liberal logic the imperialists argue with, just read
Marxism-Leninism is an evolving science. Theory written in the past holds up, but certainly isn’t all there is, much has been written today and in the last century that goes beyond Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. The CPC for example is learning from the successes and errors of the Soviet Union, including the failure of Stalin to properly line up a successor or prevent a Khrushchev-style figure from instilling a social nihilism.
Contrary to your belief, we should not be learning how to “avoid a Stalin.” We should instead be learning how to avoid a Khrushchev, a Gorbachev. Stalin built up the USSR during its most tumultuous period, it wasn’t him but his successors that ultimately tanked the project. That doesn’t mean Stalin was perfect, but he was good.