Joseph Stalin was a communist leader inspired by Leon Trotsky
Trotsky was a communist revolutionary and intellectual. He once wrote “In politics, obtaining power and maintaining power justifies anything” in his book “Leur morale et la nôtre”*
In this book, Trotsky justifies the use of lies, infiltration of other political parties, smearing, even hostage taking. He says absolute ruthlesness is necessary to overthrow a hostile system and wield power. He concludes "We are acting for the greater good. We can’t be restrained by normal morality".
Joseph Stalin took Trotsky’s advice literally. So he murdered Trotsky because he saw him as rival. Stalin also started killing people because he believed they could be sympathetic to capitalism or opponents to his power.
Matvei Bronstein: Theorical physicist. Pioneer of quantum gravity. Arrested, accused of fictional “terroristic” activity and shot in 1938
Lev Shubnikov: Experimental physicist. Accused on false charges. Executed
Adrian Piotrovsky: Russian dramaturge. Accused on false charges of treason. Executed.
Nikolai Bukharin: Leader of the Communist revolution. Member of the Politburo. Falsely accused of treason. Executed.
General Alexander Egorov: Marshal of the Soviet Union. Commander of the Red Army Southern Front. Member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Arrested, accused on false charges, executed.
General Mikhail Tukhachevsky: Supreme Marshal of the Soviet Union. Nicknamed the Red Napoleon. Arrested, accused on fake charges. Executed.
Grigory Zinoviev:: Communist intellectual. Chairman of the Communist International Movement. Member of the Soviet Politburo. Accused of treason and executed.
Even the secret police themselves were not safe:
Genrikh Yagoda : Right-hand of Joseph Stalin. Head of the NKD Secret Police. He spied on everyone and jailed thousands of innocents. Arrested and executed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genrikh_Yagoda
Nikolai Yezhov : Appointed head of the NKD Secret Police after the killing of Yagoda. Arrested on fake charges. Also executed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Yezhov
Everybody was absolutely terrified during this period. At least 500 000 people were murdered. Over 1 million people were deported to Gulags, secret prisons in Siberia, where they worked 12 hours a day.
Joseph Stalin decided to crush Ukraine for resisting communism and supporting independance. In 1933, he seized all Ukraine’s food production including all the bread, the wheat, the cows, the chicken. In the next months, over 5 million Ukrainians were starved to death. The situation was so bad that thousands of people turned to cannibalism. When the Nazis invaded Ukraine, some Ukrainians thought they were saviors
https://cla.umn.edu/chgs/holocaust-genocide-education/resource-guides/holodomor
https://www.history.com/articles/ukrainian-famine-stalin
Hitler was a monster, but we really don’t talk enough about how bad Stalin was.
To place Russian communism and Nazi-fascism on the same moral plane, in that both would be totalitarian, is superficial at best, fascism at worst.
Whoever insists on this equation may well consider himself a democrat, in truth and in the bottom of his heart he is in fact already a fascist, and certainly only in a hypocritical and insincere way will he fight fascism, while reserving all his hatred for communism.
- Thomas Mann
Quote is from this book https://www.iskrabooks.org/books/p/losurdo-stalin-history-and-critique
What is the reasoning behind that conclusion? I can see how comparing the two simply because they’re totalitarian would be superficial (there are many structural differences between both). And to me, what the Nazis did, the rhetoric they used and their rise to power has always felt much more ominous and foreboding than even Stalin’s.
But I can’t put it into words and I see no real reason why Stalin’s crimes and death camps would in any way be less evil than the Nazis’. To me it feels like Nazis went beyond just political power straight into core beliefs and ideology, whereas Stalin’s crimes were just your typical tyrant authoritarian maneuvering, but I don’t know if that really makes an ethical difference.
So if OP did not include the last line, they would not necessarily be a fascist, but because of the last line they are definitely a fascist.
And the worst part: all these powerful people did nothing about it, because of fear of each-other. One old fucker could do all of this, without being good at combat, or particulary strong.
And now for those who haven’t seen it, or haven’t seen it for a while, go and watch The Death Of Stalin. Brilliant relatively truthful satire of the events preceding and after the event.
Jason Isaacs is fantastic in it.
aside from compressed timeline - it actually does a good job representing the major players and their core traits and interactions. Lots of straightforward historical dramas about that period took a lot more artistic license in that regard. Like there’s an old movie called The Inner Circle which is basically about Stalin’s movie club - and it paints the same people in borderline caricature simplistic tones despite the movie technically being a serious drama.
If I remember it correctly, it was quite funny
It’s funny, because we weren’t there.
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Joseph Stalin was a communist leader inspired by Leon Trotsky
Obvious factual error in the first sentence. Sigh. They don’t make nazis like they used to.
Literally what I was thinking. Trotsky indirectly (but still probably intentionally) catching strays lol
Trotsky was equally as bad as Stalin actually. He was very good at reframing it after his exile but that doesn’t mean he isn’t neck deep in blood as well.
while overly simplified - the statement is technically correct - Trotsky was a big proponent of state terror campaigns and disproportional use of force to quell civil unrest. Stalin took this framework and developed it further into fully functional system. Trotsky also started the camp system that evolved into GULAG. He was also very dismissive about comrade Coba and this arrogance eventually did him in and led to his exile and later assassination.
Nah, a normal person would have said ‘inspired by Lenin’. OP is either dumb as rocks or AI.
The prison system in the soviet union was pretty similar to the system in place by the tsar - gather the problems up, send them to siberia. A new system that gestates in the womb of the old will have to struggle to shake these things, or whatever marx said.
but nah man, stalin invented prisons, go off
the tsarist prison system was nowhere near as elaborate and infrastructurally sophisticated as GULAG and it wasn’t integrated into the economy so the comparison is dubious at best.
Gulags were a practice that started under the tsar, deaths went down under soviet governance and eventually they ended it
Everybody was terrified
Not really. Many thought the charges are real, and that Stalin led them to a great future with an iron fist, that’s all. The problem was, there really was no due process involved, so many of those thinking it won’t affect them were indeed affected. My great grandfather has made some enemies at work, so they reported him on false accusations. The “investigation” was brief, he was arrested, never to be seen again. This was a shock to the family, who never expected to get into this, being law-abiding citizens.
Stalin decided to crush Ukraine
Also known as Holodomor, this topic is highly contentious among historians. There is no definitive proof that this was intentional and not a massive failure on the side of early Soviet logistics, which was a mess at the time, plagued with dishonest reporting, high latency, and other systemic issues. Still, this did lead to a massive famine killing millions, so it’s not to be taken lightly.
Stalin is indeed a highly contentious figure, and a lot of what he did has led to grave consequences. But it makes sense to set the record straight. Besides, history should serve us as an advisor, and not as an ideological battlefield.
You’re right that there is no evidence that the “Holodomor” was a genocide, while there is plenty of evidence that the guy who coined the term had Nazi affiliations and was specifically looking to smear communism.
It’s still possible to blame Moscow for the famine. After all, they were in charge. But you also have to acknowledge that it was the last famine Ukraine experienced, in a long long history of cyclical famine. Meanwhile, under capitalism we still have famine in places in Africa because it’s not profitable to stop feed poor people.
The history of communism is a history full of mistakes with the occasional bad actor. However, compare that to the history of capitalism, which is a history full of bad actors occasionally making mistakes that let the good guys to get a win.
that doesnt seem random, intellectuals and people that are likely to oppose will get killed first.
accused of false charges
Writing this is as worth as writing nothing at all. And what does the mention of Hitler have to do with any of this?
Makes you wonder whether this Stalin guy was actually on board with communism (which should be democratic to the extreme), or just used it as a excuse…
Fascist slop. Disregarded.
Are you saying the facts are wrong?
Nope, just twisted from the very first sentence saying Stalin was inspired by Trostky, when they were ideologically opposed, just because Stalin followed something he pointed out ("In politics, obtaining power and maintaining power justifies anything”), which Nicolò Machiavelli already pointed out before lol
Trostky was very vocal about Stalin’s dictatorship being, at best, a degeneration of an actual workers’ state, and got found and executed abroad for it. Had he known to play politics to shoe himself as Lenin’s heir like Stalin did and not fumbled the ball, the USSR’s democracy might have survived
This is whitewashing Trotsky
Exactly. Because nobody has ever died under Capitalism…
Vietnam war, 1.3 million. Korean war, 2.5 to 5 million. US Afghan war, over 240k. Iraq war, 600k to 1 million.
Or how about the 100,000 pregnancies impacted by thalidomide? The millions poisoned by the use of leaded gasoline? Or the deaths caused by forever chemicals, as companies knowingly poisoned people with Teflon waste?
Just scratching the surface here…
Is this post satire?
“Stalin was a communist leader inspired by Leon Trotsky”??? The two were massive rivals with completely different ideologies.
I can hear the Hexbear slop community furiously masturbating at thought of ripping this post to shreds.
As they should, with factual errors this fucking baby-brained
LOL LOL of course a tankie came out for this one.
Damn, you sure showed them! Got any other galaxy brain zingers in there, Megamind?
Any actual notes?
Hitler was a monster, but we really don’t talk enough about how bad Stalin was
Not only is The Double Genocide Theory a form of soft Holocaust denial, it’s deeply comical to claim “we don’t talk enough about how bad Stalin was”. Yes we fucking do??? American popular code culture has been built on anti-Communism for decades!
American popular code culture has been built on anti-Communism for decades!
Great, doesn’t change the fact that the majority of the world is not America.
Are US Americans even aware of this, though?
Not really, the Soviets were considered Allies. In addition, the USA supplied weapons and materials to the Soviets and the fucks used them against Finland.
In addition, the USA supplied weapons and materials to the Soviets and the fucks used them against Finland.
False. The war with Finland happened in 1939 and the lend-lease program didn’t begin until 1941. There wasn’t even a supply route connecting the USSR to the other allies until the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran, also in 1941 (which was one of the main reasons for the invasion).
and the fucks used them against Finland.
but why?
Very briefly during the second world war, but beyond that period, both before and after, the Soviets were considered an enemy of the US and co.
I swear this exact post was made a while ago here
People post shot to multiple communities on multiple instances.
“In politics, obtaining power and maintaining power justifies anything”
I mean if that doesn’t sum up most big name politicians I don’t know what does.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niccolò_Machiavelli
wrote an influential book in 1500 to argue exactly the same point. it caused quite a lot of ruckus because it deviated from medieval philosophy where even kings had to adhere to morals.
Read the book bro, that’s not at all what he argues
What does he argue?
I think it was originally meant to be satire? I could be misremembering though.
No, I’m literally asking what he says; I’ve not read Machiavelli.
There’s one dude saying “that’s what Machiavelli said!” then another saying “no it isn’t you cockforest” and now you saying that what he said is satirical.
But what did he say?
Aha. Thank you.
That honestly just reads like a modern political playbook. Literally, in some places.
Man I hate the world. I just want to be left alone in a hut in the forest.
All my life I’ve seen Stalin listed with people like Hitler and Pol Pot as murderous despots. How the hell are we “not talking enough about how bad he was?”
putins most obvious influence too, or maybe they just have a lot in common
We’re on Lemmy. A not insignificant percentage of the crowd are tankies.
the thing I love about tankies is they hate the US as much as I do 🥰
I don’t think any “tankie” is going to have their minds changed by this post. Unless they’re a 90 year old Russian who has gone out of there way to avoid “western propaganda” they’ve already heard all these points a million times over.
If anything posts like these reinforce their identity because they can dunk on them with their prepared rebuttals to all of this.
True. Tankies are in a cult.
Nah, it’s just the same as any other ideology - people follow it not because they’re ignorant and don’t know something, but because they expect a different outcome than you do, given the same inputs.
Every ideology has weak spots.
- Tankies can easily slip into left imperialism, which then locks them into an authoritarian trap and detaches them from reality on the ground
- Regular socialists and communists are yet to balance the incentives in relation to the more ambitious individuals
- Liberals are waging an impossible war against economic laws, trying to have a cake and eat it too (i.e. giving businesses incentives to grow while also fighting monopolies)
- Conservatives are inevitably undermining the very workforce they rely on, checking just how much they can cut before people fall off
Etc. etc.
Yet everyone thinks they’ll be able to manage the system in a way that always evades the issue.
I’m sorry, no, they’re definitely in a cult. Have you spoken to tankies here recently?
which then locks them into an authoritarian trap and detaches them from reality on the ground
You mean like a cult
It doesn’t have anything to do with Lemmy. American education has always given a pass to Stalin, probably because he was an extremely helpful ally in WW2. We are taught in America that WE saved the world when we entered WW2, but the reality is that the Soviet Union lost many, many more lives at the hand of the Nazis than the other allies, including America. The Soviet Union’s contribution was easily as significant as America’s. When the Soviets finally defeated the Nazis in Russia, and started marching toward Germany, one Nazi general said “If they treat us half as bad as we treated them, were in big trouble.”
So coming out of the war, school curriculums taught about the current cold war propaganda, but Hitler was the bad guy they focused on, not the guy that helped us beat him.
Just to put it in perspective, here’s a joke.
Do you know what’s the difference between nazis and communists?
Communists killed more communists.
It’s funny, because it’s true.
No it isn’t. Not even remotely.
American education has always given a pass to Stalin
Really? Stalin’s Soviet Union is why Americans have such a knee-jerk reaction to the concept of communism. We had entire moral panics that people might be brushing their teeth in a particularly Soviet way. The Soviets have been rivals or enemies a lot longer than they were allies. You find me an American that doesn’t agree with the statement “World War 2 was won with British intelligence, American steel and Soviet blood.”
My American Education included…what Americans know as the Berlin Airlift, I’d be curious to learn what the Germans and ex-Soviets call this incident. That Germany as a whole was divided East/West, with the Western half being controlled by the capitalist allies, and the East being controlled by the communist Soviets. Berlin was too, despite the city being located well into the Eastern half. So there was this little enclave of capitalism in communist East Germany, some barbecue in the borscht.
Boiling this down a bit (there was some nonsense about Russia resisting the west introducing the deutchemark) Stalin blockaded the city with the ultimatum “become communist or starve.” The West responded by flying in supplies by air, using the rationing expertise the British had developed during the war along with USAF and RAF airlift power. One pilot started dropping little parachute bundles of candy to the children who would hang out near the airport watching the planes, and when President Truman heard of this he ordered the candy drops increased.
It was that easy to come off looking like the Big Damn Heroes in this situation; they come bearing cold and starvation, we answer bearing fuel and food.
If anything, it’s the Japanese our schools go easy on; Imperial Japan were easily peers of the Nazis in the atrocity department, yet more American textbooks contain the word Auschwitz than the word Nanking.
I grew up in the Cold War era, and I hardly ever heard any real talk of Russian leaders, which was mostly Breshnev when I was growing up. Instead, it was a just a general hatred of the entire Communist/Soviet system in general. The guy at the top was just considered a figurehead. He certainly didn’t seem to have the same vicious stranglehold that Stalin had. The purges seems to have mostly died with him.
So we didn’t learn much about the people over there, mostly just the names Lenin, Stalin, Kruschev, and Breshnev. Occasionally Trotsky’s name came up. But mostly we just heard “Commies Bad. Don’t be a Commie.”
I was born about a week after Reagan said “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Growing up in the 90’s I didn’t get the childhood “better dead than red” stuff, we didn’t practice hiding under our desks from nuclear bombs. We did fire and tornado drills. As an aside, being an American school kid in the 90’s felt sane in a way I don’t think it did before or since? The Metroid were eradicated, the galaxy was at peace.
From our perspective, we had won the Cold War by default. With the iron curtain down, it was fairly easy to take a look at our old adversaries and we saw…very little we wanted. A few nice symphonies and ballets, a warehouse full of really cool rocket engines, and precisely one video game. By my era, we said “Don’t be a Commie, or you’ll end up like that.”
From our perspective, we had won the Cold War by default.
The ironic thing is, while we were celebrating our win, they never stopped fighting the Cold War We took our eye off the ball, and they didn’t, and our current situation is the result.
But more to your point, I remember reading that after the fall, we discovered that not only was Soviet technology not up to our standards, they didn’t even have the machines to make the machines that it would take to make technology at our level.
But that was back in the 80s. They’ve had a lot of time to catch up.
We felt like right gits having built the F-15 in response to the Foxbat. What’s Hisnameski defected with a Foxbat, the West finally got a look at it, and said “oh. Heheh. Shit, did we overreact.”
My favorite thing ever said about the F-15 is “The last time we took (Russia) seriously, we built that thing.”
As Eddie Izzard joked about mass murderers like Stalin: “The reason we let them get away with it is because they killed their own people, and we’re sort of fine with that. Oh help yourself! We’ve been trying to kill you for ages!”
Her[1] bit on Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bk_pHZmn5QM
For anyone that doesn’t know, Eddie Izzard is now Suzy Izzard ↩︎
Huh! No I didn’t.
It kinda makes sense, though. She was a “transvestite” for a very long time, and I guess just finally realized she was a she. :) For a while, she said she didn’t mind being called Eddie or Suzy, but more recently said that actually, she would prefer Suzy, although I suspect she’s pretty relaxed about it. :)
Social contagion, possibly. Not that it makes it inherently wrong, just saying that this seems like evidence towards that theory.
She seemed to be quite effortlessly a “male lesbian” when she was more actively touring. That was a part of a joke though, so might have meant nothing also.
All your life you’ve lived under capitalism and have been exposed to anti-communist propaganda, because to date communism has been the only successful alternative to capitalism.
Somehow OP thinks that a lifetime of anti-communism isn’t enough anti-communism.
It’s a natural pendulum moment. We are flooded with anticommunist propaganda, so when you start lifting up the curtain and seeing more and more of the lies, you can start wondering what else was a lie.
That’s the moment all sorts of ideologies jump out of the woodwork to recruit you, and given most of your education was a subjugating lie you probably don’t have the tools to distinguish them that well.
And that’s how you end up with people denying the holocaust or thinking covid is fake or saying Stalin wasn’t so bad actually.
So as we’re dismantling capitalism we’re going to have to constantly help people find their footing in reality, including helping them reaffirm the parts of capitalist propaganda that were true enough.
I live in Canada, the general vibe we get through our culture and education is that Hitler was #1 worst guy in history, everyone else was a close second.
This. Even in my psychology of genocide course in uni, a lot of it was focused on Hitler being the worst, and not much about Stalin.
Sort of related sort of not, I learned in the last few years how awful the British were, too. Different levels of awful, but I’m thinking because Canada is a commonwealth country and was pretty much run by the Brits back in the day, the Brits excluded from our education the bad things they did, ie to native Americans/First Nations people, Africa, etc. I didn’t learn about any of that… So I think what they wanted people to learn and what they wanted people to forget shaped what was taught in Canadian schools.
So, like many others, I was awed and excited by the royals. Now that I know what they’ve been trying to hide, meh.
I had probably 10 times as many educational hours dedicated to Hitler and the Holocaust as I did learning about Stalin.
Israel weaponized the Holocaust and drilled two falsehoods into everyone’s head:
- Jews were the only victims.
- The Holocaust is a special genocide that hasn’t happened before or since, is the worst crime in recorded history, and no one should dare question that.
This allows them to genocide Palestinians while calling everyone who questions their ethno supremacist expansionist colonial project a Nazi.
6 million Jews were murdered, out of 17 million victims.
Genocide of Indigenous Americans (1492–1832): it is estimated that 90% of the indigenous population, amounting to over 55 million people, died due to violence, forced labor, and disease after European colonization.
Mao Zedong (China, 1958–1961/1966–1969): Historians estimate that between 30-70 million people died due to famine, persecution, and forced labor during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.
Mongol Conquests (13th Century): Under Genghis Khan, it is estimated that 30-60 million people were killed, representing about 10% of the world’s population at the time.
To name a few… Hitler was a monster, but he was hardly the worst monster.
Even if there are genocides worse than the holocaust. The entire point of the Nazis were to kill everyone eventually in order to create their dumb idea of an ubermench.
Most genocides are about keeping power. But the holocaust was about creating a whole new humanity by killing anyone that wasn’t blue eyed, blond haired super people. It would affect the entire world eventually. Definitely not just Jews.
If we’d let them, the Nazis would have easily caused the worst genocide in human history, with no equal in reality except for the atrocities in sci fi like Warhammer 40k.
Definitely this. This is what they chose the curriculum to cover more.
because most of the atrocities that Stalin commited didn’t happen in Western world.
Yeah, the Western world preferred to export violence, not keep it home-grown
Most of the focus is on how bad communism is, not how bad its leaders were.
Edit: people are assuming that I took a stance vis-a-vis communism but I’m really talking about where western propaganda focuses
To be fair, having authoritarian government means you’ll absolutely have an oppressive regime at some point.
If anything, Stalin was the one to cement authoritarianism as the system of power in USSR and make sure it cannot be reverted without massive issues in the form of separatism, civil disobedience, and more. The subsequent leaders could only open the valve of democracy so much without breaking the country apart.
So, it’s not just leaders, it’s the system of authoritarian power and imperialism. Communism and socialism must be democratic and directly managed by worker’s councils, bottom to top (i.e. Soviet in its original sense), lest you fall into the same trap with any leader eventually.
*how bad a straw man version of communism is
Well that was my point.
I know. I seem to be the only one who upvoted you before you made the edit.
There’s a spectre haunting stoly
