[lbo-talk] Back to the USSR

Chris Doss itschris13 at hotmail.com
Fri Feb 6 04:08:07 PST 2004


James:

Chris Doss objects to being called an apologist of Stalin, but I am at a loss to understand where he differs in outlook from Stalin, or his heirs. So do tell, Chris, what exactly would have been your differences with Stalin, or Brezhnev, or are you, as charged, and unalloyed fan.

--- Actually, I am of the opinion that the October Revo was not a good thing and that the February Revo was a promising start.

Brezhnev and Stalin are two whole different balls of wax. Well, forced collectivization of agriculture was a disaster. Show trials ain't good. Brezhnev slept his way through his last decade in office and was mainly a puppet leader anyway. As I have stated, the system that was operative during that period created a dependency complex that infantalized people in a lot of ways, because they did not have to take care of themselves at all; the state did it. That said, Stalin, Brezhnev etc. were responsible for the good aspects of the USSR as well as the bad. That social welfare system was built by you-know-who, He Who Is Not To Be Named, Hastur the Unspeakable, Uncle Joe. History is not black and white. The same person can do evil and good.

That being said, Stalin did not invent dictatorship and repression in Russia. He is one in a series of bloody modernizing leaders that Russia has produced. He is a historical figure; he is not the Devil. The only thing that distinguishes him from Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great is that Dzhugashvilli had better technology and an ideology sufficiently close to a lot of people on the left to make them feel uncomfortable. I was thinking of Peter BTW when I said that history will judge Stalin well; Peter slaughtered people left and right, and they still build monuments to him, because his memory is not associated with e.g. having tortured his own son to death. It is associated with the founding of the Russian Fleet and the beginning of modernization. Similarly, give a couple of generations or so, Stalin is going to be linked with winning the War and industrializing the economy. The purges will be swept under the rug. What makes it into the history books is not what actually HAPPENED but how people PERCEIVE what happened.

---- Also, it seems to me, Chris is just confusing present-day attitudes to the Stalin, or Brezhnev eras, with the attitudes that people had at the time. --- Attitiudes in the late Brezhnev era were quite cynical. Everybody knew about the corruption and hypocrisy. Andropov is very popular to this day for having started to crack down on the corruption that characterized that era. As a history textbook I have says, "Vok takoi, Andropov!" -- "Andropov, what a guy!" ----

In 1984 the sociological institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences published a survey showing that just 34 per cent of workers in their twenties thought their standard of living was good. --- How many Americans or Brits would answer the same question positively? This is a matter of expectations and the extent to which reality matches them. In any case, they certainly lived better than the great majority of people in the world, and better than they do now. ---

Today, disappointment with market reforms might make it seem as if the past was not so bad.

--- It doesn't "seem" not so bad. It _wasn't_ so bad. Which is not say it was great either. ---

But even here I think Chris is confused. The votes for former communists and communists in the eastern bloc and the FSU do not necessarily represent a real desire to return to the past, as much as a protest at the decline in living standards since. We need to know whether the Communists in Moldova are actually putting a programme of suspending the operation of the free market. --- The overwhelming majority of the population is in favor of nationalizing big business and letting the market govern in small and medium business, with the state subsidizing the latter.

Personally, I agree with Putin's comment when he was asked what he thought about the USSR: "Whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart; whoever wants to return to it has no head." ---

Chris completely ignores the failures of the soviet economy and talks as if all of the official growth figures were kosher. --- What are you talking about? When have I ever said the Soviet economy was great? The consumer goods sucked. So did a lot of the food. Then again, grinding poverty simply did not exist in the Soviet Union. There were probably more homeless people in one London suburb than the entire USSR. ---

But as we have dicovered since, what was accounted as growth turned out to be mostly a crock. Overwhelmingly the goods produced were just substandard, or even unusable. --- Consumer goods, yes. I would not say "unusable." Soviet cars do work, you know. They just break down a lot. My Soviet B&W TV was still working after 20 years.

--

Soviet industry as a whole absorbed vast amounts of labour without increasing its output, because the greater part of that labour was squandered. --- What era are we talking about here? Growth under Stalin was huge. The slowdown starts around 1975. ---

That's why the labour market behaved so differently from the west: there were labour shortages, not surpluses, because soviet enterprises soaked up more and more labour, to no great effect.

--- Labor shortages how? Please explain. --- Chris compares the USSR with South Korea, but what soviet goods did anyone ever want? --- I did not compare SK and the USSR; Alexander Fenelon did. The USSR exported cars to Latin America, did it not? Soviet weapons and high technology were in demand everywhere. I know these are not consumer goods. What is so damn important about consumer goods anyway?

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