>>> jkschw at hotmail.com 11/03/00 05:34PM >>>
A few last notes on Stalin as warlord:
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>CB: What I am directly challenging is the idea that the German-Soviet
>non-aggression pact did not give the Soviets more time to prepare for the
>attack, and that may have helped to win in the end.
True, it gave them more time, which they misused andwasted, due to Stalin's crimes and errors.
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CB: But they didn't misuse or waste it to an extent that it caused them to lose the war, which is the main and most important test. Most likely the time they gained did contribute to winning the war in the end.
What ever Stalin's crimes and errors, they were not sufficient to prevent the heroics and extraordinary actions of the People and the CPSU from accomplishing a world historic feat. In fact, given Stalin's crimes and errors, the feat accomplished by the Party and the People was even greater.
Which brings me to another point. Doesn't this imply that during the war , the working class and Party were running the show ? How could Stalin have had bottomline control over the nation , if he was screwing up, but the nation won the war ? The only conclusion one can reach is that there was socialism in the SU, i.e. there was a self-determining mass of people who had control over their actions and lives, and were not being dictated to by Stalin. Overwise, if they were following Stalin's dictat, they would have lost, because he was committing enormous errors and crimes, right ?
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>I agree that there was unbelievable heroism of the Soviet people, but they
>must have had some unbelievably military smarts too, for not only did they
>defeat the Nazis, but also overcame Stalin's mistakes.
Quite right. And the Soviets had some great generals: Chuikov, Zhukov, Rossokovsky, Yeremov--these are names of military honor in anybody's roll.
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CB: Agree, and there was socialism in the SU during the war. The People had control over their actions, beyond Stalin's control.
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> I don't know. Seems more likely that some of what Stalin did was
>militarily smart, even some of the specifics that Justin notes, like not
>one step in retreat.
No, that allowed the Wehrmach to create huge pocket, capturing literally millions in the first weeks of the war.
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CB: Hate to say it , but see John Mage's post. These sacrifices may have been necessary to win in the long run. I can't think of the slang term for this, something like bait and switch , or rope a dope, like Mohammed Ali. When you have a stronger opponent, sometimes you have to let them "win" , let them in, and then ambush them. Actually, I read recently that Ghenghis Khan's armies used a similar fake retreat maneuver as a typical military tactic. The Soviet maneuver was more on the level of strategy for the whole war. Sitting Bull used this against Custer too. Custer was chasing a smaller group, that led him into a trap.
>Or the Communist Party was "smart", smart enough to get around Stalin and
>win.
Some of the Party leaders made real contributions to the war: Zhdanov, whatever his later role as an ideological hitman, was a fine leader in Leningrad. Khrushchev helped to hold Stalingrad. Others did a good job elsewhere. But it's not clear that the "party" did a not as an organized entity. Stalin had made sure it wasn't one with the purges.
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CB: Well, John Mage disagrees. He says the Party was arch herioic. The result indicates they had to be organized. Not the type of thing you are apt to just fall into, a victory over the German war machine.
But assume for the sake of argument you are correct - Neither Stalin nor the Party won the war , and in fact were obstacles.- doesn't that mean there was in fact socialism in the SU during the war, since the only ones left to have bee running the show would be the working masses and People themselves ? Otherwise , the war was won by magic. The People had to be in charge of themselves, which self-determination does not square with the idea of "state-capitalism".
> I really don't want to try to rescue Stalin's rep, but I think what is more likely is that he was very evil, but had some smarts too, and the whole approach of finding that he could just do nothing right is understandable from a moral point of view , but does not square with events.
It's not what I'm saying. As you acknowledge:
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>But I'll take the characterization that Stalin developed into a tolerable
>leader, because, I think Justin is correct to be stingy about complimenting
>Stalin.
>
OK.
Now, a change of subject:
>How about some discussion of why Stalin was an idealist ?
The Stalinist diamat is a dreary subject, and I know more about it than I care to. But the bottom line is that it idealist to assert the supremacy of the political over nature itself, as Stalin did with (a) genetics, in backing Lysenko, and (b) physics, in attacking quantum physics as idealist because it's hard to square with realism; as well as the supremacy of the political over economics, as he did in announcing the idea that socialism could be built in one backwards country.
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CB: Oh , I see what you mean. Quite right. But with respect to the war, Stalin was not applying anti-genetics or anti-quantum physics. Materialist realism wold make a big difference as compared with counting on racial superiority of Germans to win, etc. The aspects of materialism-idealism pertinent to the war helped the Soviets over the Germans.
Most of the Stalinist diamat is purveying of Leninism, though, not at all dreary. Most Soviet philosophers are more advanced materialists than Western Marxists for this reason.
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>How was Nietzsche not an idealist ?
>
>
Nietzsche is complicated and fascinating. He is an antirealist, a "perspectivist." That is a sort of idealism. But Nietzsche's preferred perspective, although he would assert that it had absolute truth (nothing did for him) was materialist. read On the Genealogy of Morals, for example, where he gives a class analysis of the origin of morality and religion. N was also a materialist, indeed, an eliminativist, about the mind: he thought that thinking is brain activity. He rejected the existence of supernatural deities--actually in similar terms to Marx--"God is dead," not that "There is no God," but taht at this historical moment, it become decreasingly possibly to believe in him. --jks
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CB: Nietzsche's voluntarism seems very much subjective idealist. Also, I keep hearing this theme from him and his commentators of hatred of egalitarianism and hatred of working classes, committment to an elite, supermen. The more I read and hear of Nietzsche the more he seems an arch anti-historical materialist.
On Hitler reading him, evidently many German soldiers carried copes of Thus Spoke Zaruthustra ( spelling) into the trenches with them in WWI. So, Nietzsche was popular enough that Hitler, a soldier, was likely to be familiar with him.