>
> -clippity clop_
Ah, from what I've ever written do you think I advocate the privatization, whether here or in the fSU or other Soviet-type societies (Cf. Review-Symposium on Soviet-Type Societies: Participants: Tim Luke, G.L. Ulmen, Ivan Szelenyi, Zygmunt Bauman, Gabor T. Rittersporn and Graeme Gill http://www.angelfire.com/biz/telospress/contents60.html ) of state services and industries?
Again, you overstate, the rationality and effectiveness in reaching advanced levels of social provision, the Soviet planning mechanisms. You ever skim, say, Rutland, Peter. The myth of the plan : lessons of Soviet planning experience / London : Hutchinson, 1985.
You ever read issues of the UK socialist journal, "Critique, " edited by Hillel Ticktin devoted to Soviet studies? Ticktin had some good debates with Ernest Mandel. Or does someone like a Ticktin or Mandel get scored as revisionist "Trotskyites" in Political Affairs and thus verboten?
Same for Michael Cox? I read a bit of this recently.
Rethinking the Soviet Collapse: Sovietology, the Death of Communism and the New Russia (London, Pinter, 1998), 294pp. He has a collection on E.H. Carr, I know you have to read some of his volumnious multi-vol. history of the Soviet State. http://www.aber.ac.uk/~inpwww/staff/cox_pub.html
Or do you prefer such as this by Louis Aragon? A History Of The USSR From Lenin To Khrushchev. / Translated From The French By Patrick O'Brian. : A history of the USSR from Lenin to Khrushchev. Translated from the French by Patrick O'Brian.
At least Aragon denounced the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in '68. At the Southern Ca. Library for Social Research (blanking on their exact name, near USC campus, founded by CPUSA'er and fellow travelers like retired Attorney Gen. for Ca. Robert Kenny) yrs. ago I read a pamphlet by CPUSA members that also denounced the invasion that crushed the Dubcek era reforms. Like the Gates faction, they left the Party.
P.S. http://www.biblion.com/litweb/biogs/aragon_louis.html '"Poor Aragon," Picasso chuckled as soon as Aragon had left his studio. "He doesn't know anything about pigeons. And as for the gentle dove, what a myth that is! There's no crueller animal... How's that for a symbol of Peace?"' (from Picasso: Creator & Destroyer by Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington, 1988)
When Stalin died in 1953, Aragon published a portrait of him in Les Lettres françaises under the headline 'What We Owe to Stalin". It was drawn by Picasso and arose fury. Aragon thanked the party leaders for their rebuke and published excerpts from the outraged letters sent from the different Communist cells. After the uproar had died down Picasso asked: "How can Aragon, a poet, endorse the view that it is the public which should judge reality?" Heh. "The Restoration Of Capitalism in the USSR, " (not the neo-maoist pamphlet by Michael Goldfield) http://www.oneparty.co.uk/html/book/ussrintro.html
Long live the towering genius of all humanity, the teacher and guide who is leading us victoriously to communism our beloved Comrade Stalin!"
(N. S. Khrushchev: Speech at 18th. Congress CPSU, March 1939, in: "The Land of Socialism Today and Tomorrow"; Moscow; 1939; p.381, 382, 383, 389, 390).
That Stalin's frequently expressed scorn for the "cult of personality" was perfectly genuine -- even though, as a prisoner of the concealed opposition majority, he was unable to stop it -- is illustrated by his shrewd observation to the German author Lion Feuchtwanger in 1937:
"I spoke frankly to him (Stalin - WBB) about the vulgar and excessive cult made of him, and he replied with equal candour ... He thinks it is possible...that the 'wreckers' may be behind it in an attempt to discredit him".
(L. Feuchtwanger: "Moscow 1937"; London; 1937;p.93, 94-5).
Here's a part of a poem on the death of Stalin in 1953 by the Chilean Communist poet Pablo Neruda. (It is usually, but not always, omitted from editions of Neruda's collected poems.) To be men! That is the Stalinist law! -We must learn from Stalin his sincere intensity his concrete clarity ...Stalin is the moon, the maturity of man and the peoples. Stalinists, Let us bear this title with pride. ...Stalinist workers, clerks, women take care of this day! The light has not vanished. the fire has not disappeared, there is only the growth of light, bread, fire and hope in Stalin's invincible time! ...In recent years the dove, Peace, the wandering persecuted rose, found herself in his shoulders and Stalin, the giant one, carried her at the heights of his forehead, ...A wave beats against the stones of the shore. But Malenkov will continue his work. ...We will sail there together, a poet is a fisher- man and the sea to the distant Captain who when entering into death left to all the peo- ples as a legacy, his life. Neruda's own loyalty to Stalin had motivated him, while a Chilean consul, to give false Chilean passports to a team sent to Mexico to assassinate Leon Trotsky in 1940, who had been a rival of Stalin in the Soviet Union. (That attempt was repelled by Trotsky's guards.) He also gave a Chilean passport to the Mexican painter David Siquieros so he could flee the country while on bail after taking part in an attack on Trotsky's residence. Notice that Neruda was hoping for a new maximal leader in Georgi Malenkov, Stalin's immediate successor as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Malenkov didn't last long as leader; he was out-maneuvered and ousted by Khrushchev. He survived into! his 90s , however.
-- Michael Pugliese