On Oct 18, 2012, at 11:37 AM, c b wrote:
>
> CB: The strategy of "Socialism in one country" is also the caution
> that the Russian Revolution was not "spreadable" to other countries ,
> either overtly or covertly...
There was no "Russian Revolution." For the Bolsheviks, and revolutionaries everywhere, the seizure of power by the soviets was the Proletarian Revolution and the beginning of the international proletarian revolution. Only Great Russian chauvinists like Stalin (and that is exactly what Lenin called Stalin, along with his henchmen Dzherzhinsky and Ordjonikidze, in 1923) conceived the Soviet republic as a new Russian empire. ...
> ...Lenin's judgment was in part based on the non-spreadability
> principle...
The whole revolution of the soviets was premised on the spreadability of the proletarian revolution. That was the whole difference between Lenin/Trotsky and Martov/Zinoviev in October 1917
> ...when he stopped Trotsky from leading the Red Army into Poland in
> pushing the German's out of Russia/SU in the period of the Russian
> Civil War.
Totally untrue. Trotsky *opposed* the march on Warsaw (it was a war against the French-aided Poles, not against the Germans whose war had ended two years earlier) and it was Lenin, backed by Stalin among others, who imposed the disastrous (in part because Stalin and his cohorts Budenny and Timoshenko disobeyed orders to support Tukhachevsky at the gates of Warsaw and instead drove south for a meaningless capture of Lodz) continuation of the war when a favorable peace had been offered by Pisudski. And Lenin's wrong policy was premised on an inaccurate expectation of a revolutionary uprising by the Polish masses. Three years later, in his preface to *Lessons of October*, Trotsky pointed out that Lenin had made exactly the same error as he himself had made in not immediately accepting the Brest- Litovsk diktat--overestimating the imminence of proletarian revolution (in Germany in 1918, in Poland in 1920). Shane Mage
This cosmos did none of gods or men make, but it
always was and is and shall be: an everlasting fire,
kindling in measures and going out in measures.
Herakleitos of Ephesos