>>> jkschw at hotmail.com 11/02/00 11:51PM >>>
I will go to bat for the Soviet claim to have saved the world from the Nazis, but it did so despite Stalin, not because of him. Whether on not we can explain the Stalin-Hitler pact as a desperate exercise in realpolitik--a rather plausible claim, since Stalin had spent the previous years and months attempting to get an alliance against Hitler with France and Britain--we must certainly agree that Stalin blew the chanvce he had to prepare in many ways. He purged the Red Army down to the captain level. He tore up the strong defenses at the border and moved them into the parts of Poland stolen in the partition. He ignored utterly reliable and accurate information about German war preperations, and was apparantly caught utterly off balance by the actual attack, ordering the troops not to return fire lest this provoke the Germans. The war was won, and in that sense the "strategy" "worked," but not thanks to the Father of Peoples. Thank the Russian soldiers, thank Zhukov, Yeremov, Chuikov, and Rossokovsky. But not old Uncle Joe. He nearly got us all killed. --jks
(((((((((((((
CB:
I reach out my hand in comradeship to Justin as the third batter in the lineup for the Red Army's team.
I wouldn't mind giving up old , ugly Stalin, and giving all the credit to the working masses, afterall, masses not great men make history. But, realistically, it is difficult to see how even the superduper Soviet people could have carried off such an unbelievably difficult accomplishment/"miracle", if the top guy had been a total incompetent. I can understand not wanting to associate anything whatsoever positive with the person Joseph Stalin. Yet, reality is more contradictory than story book versions of history,where the heroes are completely virtuous. Looking at the situation as a whole, making the inferences, it seems that an absolutely horrible individual, did a competent job in an extremely difficult task of avoiding being annihilated by the biggest army on earth, and even annihilating that army. One way to think of it is that Stalin's ruthlessness and shrewdness in the Party infighting served him well in the outfighting with the Nazis.
Stalin also might have had the advantage that his philosophy was materialism from Marx and Engels, while Hitler was an idealist, i.e. nightmaring, with Heidegger and Nietzsche allegedly ( *) as his philosophers. :>))
* http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/apr2000/heid-a03.shtml http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/apr2000/heid-a04.shtml http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/apr2000/heid-a05.shtml