[lbo-talk] Stalinism

Charles Brown cbrown at michiganlegal.org
Thu May 19 12:14:14 PDT 2005


Chris Doss

First, Charles, to answer your question as to why I think the USSR felt it had to industrialize so fast:

1. Because otherwise other countries would crush it (and the Nazis would have, to, if Stalin hadn't force-industrialized).

^^^^^^ CB: Bingo ! If I might reiterate. They thought they had to to avoid being crushed, and they were correct.

By the way, they didn't really avoid being crushed. They were crushed more than anybody has ever been crushed before or since, literally. Yet they survived it. That's, to me , a pretty big measure of the strength of the socialism they had. Imagine what Soviet socialism would have accomplished if they hadn't been so crushed.

^^^^^^^

2. Second, ideology. As we all know, in Marx, only an industrialized, developed country has the prerequisites for socialism. The USSR obviously was not an industrialized, developed country. Therefore, we have to create the prerequisites ourselves. When did the USSR declare itself to have achieved socialism -- the 1930s?

^^^^^^ CB: Bingo 2 ! Gotta _have_ a proletariat to have a proletarian revolution.

^^^^^

On to the second, Russification point -- I'm not sure exactly what you mean. Russian culture (and I really should have said Russian peasant culture), understood broadly, was the culture of the overwhelmingly majority of the population of the Empire, including Ukraine, especially in the parts that made a difference as far as policy was concerned (not too many Kazakhs, Uzbeks or Chechens in the Politburo). Russification in the sense of banning Ukrainian in the 30s was a different issue.

^^^^^

CB:I think that was somebody else's point. I don't know from Russification
:>) . Well, again, without the use of patriotism, the Nazis might not have
been defeated. As I am sure you know, Chris, the Soviets and Former Soviets term it The Great Patriotic War. As in general, capitalism was able to force the SU to back up from many socialist principles, for, nationalism was used by the Germans to consolidate military aggression against socialism. Yet, socialist idealists would have had the SU give up that same ability use patriotism to marshall military defense against the most vicious attack of all times. There wasn't much room for giving up all means of defense, as the margin of victory was very small. Nazi troops were on the outskirts of Moscow , all that.

Otherwise, Stalin wrote the Bolshevik articles on the national question. The evidence from the Asian republics is of much affirmative action by the Great White Russians, especially when we compare it to the records of other colonial-imperialist nations.



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