[lbo-talk] (no subject)

heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Tue Feb 3 08:27:47 PST 2004


Chris Doss is right to say that he is not 'overwhelmingly knowledgeable' about Trotsky. But berating Trotsky for his dependence upon the 'inevitable' Chris seems to think that the course of the history of the USSR would not be all that different if somebody else had come into power apart from Stalin. But above all the USSR was created by the conscious intervention of men and women into the course of history. More than at any other moment, political choices mattered. Making light of them is indeed a way of minimising the fantastic, and destructive, failure that Stalin and the post 1930 leadership made of it. The old myth that Stalin stood up to Hitler really fails to take into account the role that soviet acquiescence and collaboration played in enhancing Nazi influence in eastern Europe; as it fails to take into account the purging of the military, and the surrender of territory to Germany in the years before the siege of Stalingrad; finally it fails to understand that the German militarary machine was disintegrating from within.

Chris imagines that history is so much raison d'etat, and that people only remember the victors. Stalin was the same. 'how many divisions has the pope got?' he's supposed to have said. But the pope got the last word, because military might isn't everything.

It's a shame that Russians are not interested in Trotsky, but hardly a surprise. Their experience of life in the 'superpower' that Stalin made, and his heirs clung onto, is enough to put anyone off politics for life. I suppose you might even want to vote for Vladimir Putin in such circumstances.



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