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

Literally what I was thinking. Trotsky indirectly (but still probably intentionally) catching strays lol

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…

Yeah… if I’m not mistaken, basically Russia was pre-industrial society before the revolution, and needed Europe to revolutionize too for that industry; but viceversa might not have been true, because had Europe revolutionized first, we could have pushed through the hardships with our preexisting industry.

But that revolution didn’t come, so Russia was left crippled: still pre-industrial, and damaged from the revolution, from the World War, and from imperialists trying to stop them.

That crippling made workers enter survival mode, both morally and literally, not being able to participate in democracy, which is what ultimately let Stalin and his allies raise to power and do what he did.

And because the few other states who revolutionized were dependant on the USSR, the degradation towards Stalinism affected them as well and made them degrade into their own version of it.