--- Michael Pugliese <michael.098762001 at gmail.com> But, the original set of ideologies organized under the Bolshevik rubric (not by any means all internally coherent, otherwise why was there so much polemical struggle inside the Bolshevik party like that between Bogdanov and Lenin, for example?) before Stalinism obliterated the democratic and libertarian elements of Bolshevism, were not so easily seperable from the problems of constructing and running a new society. Look at say, Peter Kenez work on Soviet Agit-Prop on the 20's. They believed in what what they trying to mobilize the working class, whether just off the farm or not, to accomplish.
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Overposting, sorry.
This is part of my point. There was almost no working class. There were a huge mass of illiterate peasants who believed that witches sucked blood from cows, Jews used Christian children to make matzoh and wanted to be led by a God-man (why was it so easy to believe in Trotskyist wreckers? From witches and grand Jewish plots to rule the world it's not a very big leap.) Theodor Oizermann, in Marksizm i Utopizm, which will probably never be translated, makes sort-of this point. Leninism was not destroyed by "Stalinism" -- it was subsumed into a wider ideology brought about by Russian culture, material conditions in the country and the pressing need to industrialize the country ASAP. Or anyway that is my provisional theory.
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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