The point wasn't stabilizing the Soviet (not Russian, dammit) economy; it was accelerating it forward. The vast majority (80%+) of the deaths during the Stalin period were a direct, albeit unintended, result of the breakneck industrialization policy, which caused famine in the agricultural regions of the country as the USSR sold grain abroad to finance the first Five-Year Plan.
It is kind of interesting how the Trots focus on the Moscow Trials, as opposed to the giant famine, given that the former affected only a small number of people in the elite that the average Soviet person didn't care about and the latter affected tens of millions of peasants. Did Trotsky himself ever talk about the famine?
--- On Thu, 8/13/09, James Heartfield <Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
>
> The argument is falling into the past, now, but I think
> that Stalinism was a useful characterisation, turning not on
> authoritarianism (which was an effect not a cause) but on
> Stalin's adoption of the policy of 'Socialism in one
> country' which threw the development of the international
> communist movement into reverse. It was the substitution of
> the policy of stabilising the Russian economy for one of
> revolutionising capitalism that led to the repressive
> measures against the party and later against Russian
> society.
>
> Davis was in the same position as a lot of radicals.
> Critical of their own societies, they invested the Soviet
> Union with virtues it did not possess. But that was a
> secondary question to the one of what policy to pursue in
> America, which is where one ought to begin to analyse the
> CPUSA's strengths and weaknesses.
>
>
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com