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>>> Alexandre Fenelon <sfenelon at africanet.com.br> 12/17/99 07:24PM
I don't know if Socialist countries have an absolute necessity of a large
security apparatus like the USSR. This might be justified in context of
civil war, but it's difficult to defend the necessity of Stalin's Great
Purges and forced collectivization. Maybe they may have been counter
productive from the point of view of economic development. It's even
more difficult to explain the madness of The Great Leap Forward and
Cultural Revolution. I think that all this could have happened due to
lack of democracy, since no one could really talk about was happening
those times. I also don't understand why a socialist country must be
a one party dictatorship. I understand the objective circunstances that
led the USSR to a dictatorship, but I still think that many human
suffering could be avoided with more democracy (even if it was democracy
only inside the PCUS), and, maybe a socialist and democratic USSR could
have survived the Cold War (this is a hope, not a scientific statement).
(((((((((((((
Charles: I agree with you in the sense that I wish the Soviet state had been more democratic. I also agree with you that more democracy may have helped to prevent the death of Soviet socialism.
However, I think even a more democratic state would have had to have a state apparatus, with a military to defend against the attacks during the Civil War and WWII from the Nazis. I don't see how anarchists would have built a state sufficient to defend against these.
CB