CB>...That's why Michael Pugliese comments to me are patronizing. What anti-Sovietism is he going to tell me about that I haven't heard already or even subscribed to at one time ? It never occurs to him that in terms of openmindedness, I have been both anti- and pro-Soviet. But he has only been anti-Soviet. It never occurs to him ,or any others who consider me dogmatic, that I have lived most of my life inundated with anti-Soviet brainwashing, which means I am likely to have considered criticisms of the Soviet Union, his arguments, much more than he has considered positive assessments of the SU, my arguments...
Well, I will admit I have been patronizing to you Charles ;-( That said, I've taken classes with scholars like Peter Kenez from UCSC who from being an activist in the Hungarian Revolt in '56 knew firsthand, Stalinist repression. (No scare quotes, Chaz, I'll look up tomorrow at the SF State library a volume from the mid-30's from the USSR with proud declarations by Khuschev and others in the top leadership circles of Stalinist loyalty. Or, from that history of the CPUSA by Harvey Klehr that Hal and Teodore Draper both blurbed where Earl Browder exclaims to reporters in the late 30's that he is a Stalinist.)
What you and others like you I've met in person or over the internut that still claim adherence to the CPUSA never seem to get is that folks like me, to a large extent, gather the bulk of the their political critique of Stalinism from Trotskyist sources like the papers in, "The Stalinist Legacy, " edited by Tariq Ali, no stooge of iomperialism he, ex-Communists (with a Capital, "C, ") like E.P. Thompson, Fernando Claudin (see, "The Communist Movement, " 2 vols. Monthly Review Press, late 70's) and F. Furet's recently translated history of Communism,
post-Trots like Castoriadis and other dissident communist traditions like the council communists like Mattick, Sr. that Rakesh tried to make you read to no avail. And, of coarse, a healthy dose of socdems and Cold War Liberals (mostly the Partisan Review ex-Communistcrowd that Alan Wald and many others have written about to death~ see, "A Partisan Century: Politicasl Writings from Partisan Review, " edited by Elizabeth Kurzweil~
A final point. "Anti-Soviet? Me? (Though in the fSU, I betcha I would have run afoul of Clause 175 of the Soviet Constitution, "anti-Soviet agitation." Or maybe, their popular, 'hooliganism, " charge ;-) Nah, until the apparatus smothered in blood the revolutionary energies unleashed in 1917, I see Soviet history, internally, as positive. And, without a doubt, the Vietnamese and others would not have beaten militarily the US w/o the fSU and Hitler was defeated primarily by the fSU. (And Soviet foreign policy compared to the reactionary positions [dare I say, "objectively counter-revoplutionary!) of the PRC due to the Three World Thory of the Maoists, was much more supportive of the third world national liberation movements. Michael