Wrong. Read books
this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2024
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I want a discussion. It shouldn't be that hard to explain.
I'm not going to convince you of Christianity by saying.
Wrong, go read the bible. It's not that simple.
They're inviting you to read history, not claims of the supernatural. Most of us arrived at our more reasonable assessments of the Stalin administration by studying mature works of history. If you are expecting somebody to spend only a couple minutes refuting decades of Cold War propaganda then you are unlikely to find much help anywhere.
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70% good 30% bad
Care to elaborate?
This was said by Deng Xiaoping about Mao regarding the mistakes of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. It is the official party line of the CPC.
Me and others think it fits well with Stalin
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 sure if it was the right way to seize resources from the rich and prevent counter-revolution, but those were different times. I’m personally against violence.
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?
This is an odd question in the context of the USSR and WWII. It’s not like we’re debating about Milo Yiannopoulos on Twitter and whether it’s correct to call him a Nazi because technically he wasn’t a member of the party from the early 20th century. “Nazis” here refers to members of the Wehrmacht and the Nazi party. It may also include, as a shorthand, people who were not formally party of the Nazi party but provided material aid to the Nazis. That’s treason in any country, especially during wartime.
Do counter revolutionaries deserve to be sent to worker camps where the conditions are so bad many die?
No. To the extent that imprisoning people is necessary, they deserve humane conditions. The goal should be rehabilitation, but that’s not possible in all circumstances. It’s my understanding that the harsh conditions of Soviet prisons were largely due to wartime scarcity and improved as time went on.
"Send people who don't agree with my world view to worker camps" Doesn't feel like a good thing
“disagreeing with my world view” is a weird way to say “stealing vast swaths of wealth” or “enslaving people” or “invading a sovereign nation” or “committing mass murder of Jews, Romani, queer people, and socialists”. I’m not going to pretend that 100% of Soviet prisoners deserved to be there or that everyone who died deserved to die. But to act like the entire system was a systemic way to imprison people for thought crimes is disingenuous. Probably not your intention, but rather because that’s the framing of decades of propaganda surrounding Soviet prisons.
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For starters, "Gulag" just means "prison." Of course prisons existed in the USSR, and many had rather brutal conditions. Others did not, and treated prisoners 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.
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.
Should Stalin be idolized? I don't think so. 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 is neither a hero nor a unique monster that should be especially condemned over others. 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 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.
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.
Excellent work, comrade 🫡
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