heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk:
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.
--- See, this is where I disagree. History is the result (mostly) of mass economic, political, social and ideological forces. No matter who was in charge of the Soviet state (which always seems to get reduced to "Stalin" or "the bureaucrats," ignoring that Stalin, whether people like to hear it or not, did enjoy a popular base) would have had to deal with a) mitigating external pressure, b) the need to centralize authority, c) modernize against the background of probable military threat, and frankly I don't see what other course was possible. (I am speaking in broad outlines here -- maybe if Trotsky or Bukharin or somebody else had been at the helm, the USSR wouid have had a more rational agricultural policy.)
Would Trotsky really not have purged the army if he was worried about a military coup? Who knows? Maybe, maybe not.
----
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.
--- He didn't get it in against Stalin. He got it in against Gorbachev. (Whoops!) ----
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.
---- A) I realize that life in the USSR is supposed to have been like living in a horrible dungeon, but it just ain't so. As a matter of fact it was very carefree. The USSR was like one giant daycare center with tanks and ICBMs. B) People vote for Vladimir Putin because the economy is booming, wages are going up and being paid on time, the oligarchs are cowed, and Russia's presence on the world stage is once again back near the top rank. In fact, Putin has raised Russia's world prominence to a greater extent and in a shorter time than any General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and presided over the greatest economic growth since the early Khrushchev era. (Or maybe I should replace "Putin" with "economic/political/social forces" here. :) )
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