It would be more accurate to say that the Bolshevik revolution, though impossible without the peasantry lacked the peasantry's long-term support, and therefore produced counterrevolution, the hallmark of which became Stalinism. Counterrevolution in Russia meant a backslide into a wholesale state-monopoly capitalist system (though this arguably started under Lenin, around when Fannie shot him), as well as further backslide into political dictatorship. It was counterrevolution which led to the wholesale slaughter and downright genocide of peasants under Stalin; I don't think we'd argue that peasant genocide was consistent with the worldview of the peasant majority in Russia.
--adx
---
I was thinking more of the Brezhnev years, which are my general frame of reference, but you'd be surprised the extent to which people were capable of compartmentalizing things. (My own family managed to support Hitler even though the Nazis sterilized one family member and euthanized another.) Stalin could do no wrong by definition. He was like Yahweh. I think it's hard for us to even imagine the mixture of euphoria and terror that accompanied that period.
The grandfather of the wife of a friend of mine recently died at the age of 90-something. He was a Soviet Army officer in WWII and, like a lot of them, got sent to the GULAG after his return. Shortly before his death he summed up his attitude to the Stalin years by saying "I love Stalin and I hate Stalin, and I hate myself for loving Stalin."
===== Nu, zayats, pogodi!
__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Easier than ever with enhanced search. Learn more. http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250