[lbo-talk] Enough With the China Shtick Already!

James Heartfield Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Tue Feb 2 03:30:07 PST 2010


When Lenin asked Trotsky to lead the Red Army, Trotsky was at first unwilling, fearing that Russian (and others) would not follow a Jew. Lenin's answer was that if the Red Army was so beholden to anti-semitic prejudice then it would fail anyway. The Red Army did pretty well under Trotsky, as it turned out.

Later, as the initial successes ran into the ground, Stalin and other Soviet leaders played the patriotic Russian chauvinst card to rally a defence against Hitler. Also, as Trotsky argued at the time, Stalin played on anti-Semitic prejudices to defeat the opposition and the older bolsheviks.

So, yes, I am sure that Chris is right that the internationalist outlook of the bolsheviks, circa 1917-1923 was reversed, leading eventually to persecution, and an unhealthy primordialisation of ethnic origins. That is the outcome of the defeat of the Russian revolution, and its descent into national pettiness. as Trotsky said at the time, the deal with Great Russian chauvinism would end with the disintegration of the Soviet Union along national lines - a pretty good prediction, if he did underestimate the timescale.

On the grander scheme, Lenin was right, if the Russians failed to shake off their anti-Semitic prejudices, they, as well as Jews in the USSR, would pay the price. Milions of Russian and other ethnic groups in the Soviet Union sacrificed to Stalin and the bureaucracy's crackpot dictatorship demonstrate as much. When they stamped a 'J' on Teodor Shanin's papers, the Soviet authorities were really telling him and us that they belonged to the past.



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