Allies against fascism?

John Mage jmage at panix.com
Mon Nov 6 11:13:51 PST 2000



>
> ((((((((((((
>
> CB: Thanks for the education on these issues, John.
>
> To me an interesting point here is that doesn't this mean that there was
> socialism in the SU in this period ? I mean for those who conclude that Stalin
> was an obstacle to victory, that means that the CPSU and the Soviet people and
> working class, overcame Stalin AND the Nazi war machine. How could they have
> done all that unless they really were running themselves ? How could that occur
> under a "state capitalist" regime or dictatorship ?

((((((((((

JM: Sorry Charles, but I don't have the skill to discuss the nature of the USSR in those terms. I have seen otherwise sensible people go into trances muttering (or shouting at a different stage of the disorder) "state capitalism" or "degenerate workers state" or "really existing socialism" or "totalitarian" or whatever. Some were so incapacitated that they argued that nothing of real significance changed in the USSR in 1989-1992. Let's leave it that IMHO you have the basics right. There was in 1941 an enormous disconnect between the great majority of the citizens of the USSR on collective farms & in villages & in new-built factory towns whose lives had substantially improved in terms of health and education and even self-determination, the local party member likely to be the first literate member of his or her family, and the terrorized urban intelligentsia.

A couple of weeks ago I went to a lecture by the learned Princeton Menshivik Moshe Lewin on the 30's USSR. A main point was that the CPSU leadership were obsessed - despite all their own propaganda - with their belief in how fragile the regime was. At the very top (where our historical attention is - incorrectly - focused) were the paranoid murderous Stalin and his politburo, who in Lewin's words "knew they were on death row." An incredible body of detailed orders went out from this center, but when you examine the archive (says Lewin, who has) you find how little response there was. But, says Lewin, there really had been a social revolution and the majority - poor peasant and first generation workers - saw their surroundings as "theirs" & (under the leadership of CPSU members likely to be their own children or siblings) tried to make things work as best they could.

The questions (from grad students at Columbia) were stupid. One young woman attacked Lewin for calling Stalin "paranoid" & demanded if he had any contemporary medical evidence. Lewin much too gently pointed out the difficulty in imagining the psychoanalysis of Stalin. A Woody Allen role.

As for Stalin in WWII, of course he was (or at least became) a good strategist and manager. He recognized competence in General Officers and promoted a very able group to command, was able to learn from his - some quite disastrous - mistakes, and was eventually able to concentrate what strength was available at the most critical points. (That Stalin was also a murderous paranoid is in no contradiction to his having become a good wartime chief executive). But this Stalinstuff is less important than that the Soviet effort could call upon the inherited human capital of a social revolution: (1) the generation who believed (rightly or wrongly is a futile question) that Soviet society - including its social property but more than that - was "theirs" & worth fighting to defend; and (2) the average CPSU member who - in (unavoidably) the context of *being* a party member - made their military and economic command apparatus work.

Justin writes:
> As to whether
> the party was a coherent enough entity to be said to be an agent under
> Stalinism, and especially during the war, if John thinks it was, we'll have
> to disagree. I think the purges had done their work.

Not sure about your point here: collective agency is no problem for you, but requires some minimum of "coherence." OK. Army is not just adding up a lot of soldiers, and Party is not just adding up a lot of party members. "Coherence" is shorthand for the extra invisible to methodological individualism. But if purges negate that extra, why in the party but not the army?

and


> Likewise about the
> wisom of Stalin's "strategy" in the first days of the war: Surely strategic
> retreat was necessary, but this is what "not one step back" precluded.

No, Justin; this is what "not one step back" made possible. Imagine the results of the order: "Run for your lives, our enemy is far stronger than we are." The "sacrifice" (which Bryan Fugate compares to a poisoned pawn) is not of inanimate things but of actors and collective agents - divisions, armies - who think. For this strategy (according to Fugate Zhukov's, not Stalin's - just that Stalin saw the disastrous results of the Feb 1941 war games & accepted Zhukov's critique) to work the frontier armies had to resist to the fullest extent possible, & had to be ordered to do so, & had to be kept in the dark about their fate. This would create the possibility that units which could maintain minimal *coherence* could fight their way back, since the panzer "pincers" could "close" but without sufficient motorized infantry the Wehrmacht was unable to prevent at least smaller units retreating successfully. & to some considerable degree this is what happened. Worth a visit is the museum of the ruined fort at Brest-Litovsk that fought on for months, tying down major German strength, while the "front" came to be hundreds of miles away. The German forces at Brest-Litovsk - multiplied at every other "sacrificed" army - were not able to intercept the units (and flood of civilians) who did manage to retreat. There were errors enough god knows, but insofar as this was the Soviet strategy, "not one step back" was analytic to it.

john mage



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