I don't know how much you can blame on this, but it is notable that the people heading the USSR at the time were extremely poorly educated and I think extremely naive. I'm looking at Kaganovich's Party Card right now. It says:
Year of Birth: 1893 Nationality: Jewish First Language: Russian Other Languages: Ukrainian Social Position: Worker Profession: Cobbler Education: ---------- General Education: Home-Schooled Military Education in the Old Army: None Military Education in the Red Army: None Civilian Education: None Party Education: None ---------- Party Membership and Date of Joining: Communist Party (Bolsheviks), 1911 Membership in Other Parties: None
--- James Heartfield <Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> Andie writes:
>
> "And you
> might blame some impossible-to-calculate millions of
> the 25 millions of the Great Patriotic War on
> Stalin's
> criminal negligence with regard to Hitler's
> intentions
> after the Pact. (That one, Doug, you can probably
> pin
> on the Father of Peoples personally.)"
>
> Well, no, I would blame that on the Nazi regime and
> the Wehrmacht
> personally. Stalin and the rest of the party
> leadership can be blamed for
> not being prepared (see Berezhkov, At Stalin's Side,
> p. 202). But it was
> German militarism that waged war on the Soviet
> people, and the blame is
> theirs.
>
> In general, I would say that there is a difficulty
> in separating out the
> subjective failures of Stalinism from the objective
> conditions. The whole
> trajectory of Stalinism was that it filled the
> vacuum left where capitalism
> failed, but the working class were not strong enough
> to take control.
> Consequently, the Stalinists tended to be left in
> charge of countries that
> were collapsing, or on the verge of collapse -
> conditions that militated
> against justice and humanitarianism. So I don't
> think it is possible to
> adapt a profit and loss account of deaths or lives
> saved to estimate
> Stalinism - except of course for those directly
> executed in political
> purges. Without the control of a successful workers'
> state in Russia we
> cannot estimate how many lives lost are due to
> Stalinism, and with it we
> would not need to make the calculation.
>
> On the other hand, the subjective failings of the
> Stalinists are pretty
> grotesque. At their root they stem from the desire
> to dress up failure as
> success. There would have been nothing wrong with
> conceding that
> post-revolutionary society was in a dire state, and
> in no position to make
> social reforms. But to dress up crisis management as
> the New Jerusalem, that
> was criminal.
>
> Likewise, there was nothing wrong with making
> concessions to the market in
> the NEP - social reform cannot jump ahead of its
> material basis. The error
> was to adapt to the initial success of NEP and make
> it into a principle,
> rather than a strategy - until the peasants' trading
> activities threatened
> the state. Similarly, there was nothing wrong with
> trying to take control of
> the countryside. But Stalin's repression was a
> precisely a failure to take
> control. Military rule only led to a collapse in
> agricultural production -
> hence the famine.
>
> And so too, there was nothing wrong with trying to
> buy time by compromising
> with Hitler. What was unforgiveable was the lauding
> of this policy as a
> positive contribution to human progress, rather than
> accepting it for what
> it was, an attempt to gain a breathing space. Worse
> still was Stalin's
> taking the opportunity to carve up Poland, thereby
> making Socialism
> synonymous with the division of the spoils.
>
>
>
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