‘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.’
Five million people died in the famine of 1932-4 caused by ‘collectivisation’ of agriculture. Hundred of thousands of political prisoners were detained in barbaric conditions. Basic legal rights were suspended. Whole populations ‘Ingush, Chechens and Cherkess’ were re-located to placate Russian chauvinism. Internal passports recorded the racial origins of the bearer. Anti-Jewish campaigns in the 1950s saw thousands persecuted. This workers’ state failed to develop a consumer goods sector, reducing its working class to penury and squandered labour in the pointless waste. Political representation was denied its citizens.
If this was a ‘day care centre’, it was one run by Myra Hindley and Ian Brady. Given the mockery Stalin and his successors made of socialism, it is not surprising that the restitution of the market seems like a preferable alternative.
Hari Kumar (who shares a name with the Paul Scott character) thinks my claims that Stalin enhanced Nazi authority in Eastern Europe, that he sabotaged the soviet military, and that he abandoned much of the Soviet Union to Germany to be contentious. But Stalin did make an alliance with Hitler, supporting his annexation of Poland, and he did purge the Soviet military rendering his high command ineffective, and the undefended Soviet Union surrendered half of its industrial production and half of its population to Nazi control in the occupation.
Joanna Bujes thinks my dismissal of the suppression of the Kronstadt uprising as glib. But it was Trotsky who compared it to suppressing Kolchak’s forces, in his article on Kronstadt.