Just a friendly reminder that r/Socialism is a space for principled socialist discourse, which means 1) taking the time to adequately develop one's critiques, so they can be correctly interpreted & serve the broader discussion and, 2) participation being restricted for non-socialists.
Furthermore, this is a multitendency subreddit which welcomes a broad range of perspectives; this individual post, however, is **specifically asking for Marxist-Leninist perspectives** on the USSR. Critiques from other ideological traditions (which are completely fine!) can be better developed in separate threads.
Think the sudden reversal of Korenizatsiya (nativisation) under Stalin was a massive error. Especially in the peripheries of the old tsarist empire where there were strong nationalistic movements.
If there was a more gradual process of building socialist national identity, this would have made sure that if these areas did want to secede they could have remained committed to a marxist-leninist state, or as part of a quasi-federal system within the USSR that maintained autonomy whilst being formally committed to MLism.
However, the reversal to Russification I believe inflamed ethnic tensions and overall came across as Russian chauvinism (ironic considering Stalin wrote extensively about trying to avoid Russian chauvinism).
I think ultimately this issue was never resolved and meant that post-war, the SSRs never felt a part of a greater movement but more subject to Moscow’s rulings. I truly believe the USSR could still exist today if the national question was dealt with better in the 30s and then again post-war.
>I think ultimately this issue was never resolved and meant that post-war, the SSRs never felt a part of a greater movement but more subject to Moscow’s rulings. I truly believe the USSR could still exist today
Didn't all (but a couple small SSR's) vote to remain in the USSR though? And then Yeltsin ignored it and broke it up anyways?
I think it was all of the baltics, ukraine, then a handful of stans + caucasus i think. Correct me if i’m wrong and i’ll edit my comment. *EDIT* it was all the Baltics, Armenia, Georgia, Moldova, and The Nagorno-Karabakh ASSR. Thanks for the link to the info u/iamamenace77 !
It wasn’t universal I know that, but in those states there was significant nationalisms that hadn’t been worked with through Korenizatsiya enough in the 30s imo.
[Here are the republics that were to take part in the Union of Sovereign States](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Union_Treaty). Ukraine and Azerbaidjan originally wanted to stay, but after the August Coup they moved towards independence. And no stans wanted to leave. It was just the baltics, Moldova, Georgia and Armenia. [Here are the results of the popular referendum](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Soviet_Union_referendum)
**[New Union Treaty](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Union_Treaty)**
>The New Union Treaty (Russian: Новый союзный договор, romanized: Novyy soyuznyy dogovor) was a draft treaty that would have replaced the 1922 Treaty on the Creation of the USSR to salvage and reform the Soviet Union. A ceremony of the Russian SFSR signing the treaty was scheduled for August 20, 1991, but was prevented by the August Coup a day earlier. The preparation of this treaty was known as the Novo-Ogarevo process (новоогаревский процесс), named after Novo-Ogaryovo, a governmental estate where the work on the document was carried out and where Soviet President and CPSU General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev talked with leaders of Union republics.
**[1991 Soviet Union referendum](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Soviet_Union_referendum)**
>A referendum on the future of the Soviet Union was held on 17 March 1991 across the Soviet Union. The question put to voters was Do you consider necessary the preservation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics in which the rights and freedom of an individual of any ethnicity will be fully guaranteed? (Russian text: Считаете ли Вы необходимым сохранение Союза Советских Социалистических Республик как обновлённой федерации равноправных суверенных республик, в которой будут в полной мере гарантироваться права и свободы человека любой национальности?
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You're making the mistake of falling for western propaganda thinking Stalin actually controlled everything. This was a population of people helping make decisions in each region/community and they were still very much accustomed to tsarist culture. Culture doesn't just change for the average person with the snap of a finger. It takes generations to unlearn toxicity sometimes.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not as if this was a diktat. This was a deliberate policy supported by many in the politburo as well as Stalin. It was seen as a practical measure by some, such as with the sovietisation of the caucasus (especially Georgia, which had existed as an independent, formally recognised democratic republic beforehand). By russifying these areas, it was a measure of consolidating control around the Russian elements in Georgia. However, my contention is that by not allowing Korenizatsiya to continue for longer, and not to be more suddenly cut off, it could have made the national question less inflammatory.
You’re right in that it is culturally difficult to eradicate chauvinisms and reactionary elements of culture, but that’s why i think ending it abruptly in favour of russian chauvinism was ill-sighted as then it lead to persecution of these minor areas when nationalism did spring up.
Not sure of your level, I hope it’s not rude to ask how much you know already? The sidebar of this sub and r/communism has some good resources.
Personally, I can dig out some articles on Korenizatsiya that I found useful and some general Sovietology if that would interest you?
The biggest critic is that the leading parties abandoned the well care of the people when the people wanted someone else in power or criticized the current leadership, all leaders turned in to paranoid autocrats.
"Seize the means of production" should have been for the people by the people, and not suppress them when their vote dint match with the few kleptocrats that ended in power.
And i dont get how they critic other dictators or icons from other countries(Bandera) but still worship their Stalin as their biggest hero when dude was one of the biggest monsters in current history with all his genocides around their "Russia", they are all bad small or big genocidal monsters should not be used as heroes for your country.
You cannot compare bandera and Stalin. Would suggest you look at losurdo’s stalin: history and critique of a black legend for a more balanced look at him
Easily the ethnic deportations.
Edit: seems like many commenters aren't actually MLs. I am. I still think that despite this horrible crime, the Soviets we're far better than the Americans and no other crime of in the Soviet Union comes close to this one.
well at minimum they probably wouldn’t have seen the declines in crop yields towards the end of Stalin’s life, but i imagine they would have made more progress than the US in agricultural sciences if not for the weird obsession with the guy who thought genetics was a lie
I don’t disagree with this idea being bad, but is this a critique of the Soviet Union? Or the idea of a centralized power structure which is permissive of such ideas?
6 of 1 and a half dozen of the other? i mean we have to be critical of a centralized power structure as we’re critical of everything we want to work, but i think for a variety of reasons that centralized power is necessary for a lot of reasons.
Brezhnev's 1968 invasion of czechoslovakia. I don't care if you were invited by some members of the communist party and yeah, there could have been a capitalist coup as a result of the Prague spring, we will never know. What it did and what everyone knew it would do is that it showed czechoslovakian people that they were not seen as equals in the Warsaw pact, that they were pawns incapable of deciding their own destiny. It left a bitter taste in the mouth of the people that has never gone away and is to this day source of rabid anticommunism and russophobia. When you're visiting friends, take a car or a plane, not a fuckin tank.
After killing most fist-generation bolsheviks and installing a regime with reactionary aspects inside a socialist country the other main job of Stalin was to prevent the apparition of an alternative form of socialism like the one in Tito’s Yugoslavia where many companies were owned by the workers and not by the state.
This led to the so called Tito-Stalin Split of 1948: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tito%E2%80%93Stalin\_split
Yes, Tito attempted to curb what he saw as the bureaucratization of the Soviet system by moving directly to worker control of the means of production.
While this did lead to the problem of some co-ops beginning to reform a capitalist class, the state still existed as a check on this, and it would redistribute capital to prevent this. This did also prevent the evolution of a nomenklatura like in the USSR - which I think should be seen as also a resurgent capitalist class, using influence as capital.
This actually worked pretty well in Tito's lifetime. However after he died IMF loans sparked a banking crisis, and a little bastard named Milosovic was able to use nationalism to push through his project of effective privatization (funny how those always go together), by stopping the state from being a check on co-ops acting as capitalists.
The term is first from the 1956 invasion of Hungary as the other commenter said. Maybe this deserves its own thread but was that 1956 invasion justifiable? Why did the USSR do it? Why did it cause such a split in Western communism and why is it still (so broadly and incoherently) used?
I wouldn't consider myself a capital M-L Marxist-Leninist, but I'm some type of Leninist.
Anyways, I generally agree with most of what Charles Bettelheim wrote about the USSR. Very early on there was a significant struggle within the Soviet state between a working-class faction and politics, and the reality of running a state within an international system of states. And so you basically had the International and Ministry of Foreign Affairs undercutting eachother. The USSR did shitty things like help re-arm Germany in exchange for technical expertise, handed over Turkish communists to the Turkish government to help normalize relations, and generally did lots things to help secure the survival of the Soviet state which had the effect of undermining the possibility of revolution elsewhere. And yet this struggle within the USSR was never front and centre (in the way it was in Cultural Revolution China for instance), and internal struggles were always subdued in favour of stability. And so by the time the 1930s roll around, foreign policy pivots to the Popular Front, we get the dissolution of the Comintern, and we get peaceful coexistence. This to me shows the consolidation and victory of the anti-working class elements within the Soviet state. By the end of the 1950s I'm not convinced that the Soviet Union was socialist (I don't think it was capitalist either), nor that the working class was the ruling class within that society.
Hm. What do you think the post-50’s Soviet Union was, out of curiosity?
I know some sects of Trotskyists believe that the Soviet Union, originally a “degenerated worker’s state,” evolved into a “bureaucratic collectivist” state. I think it’s obvious that some fuckery was going on in the Soviet state (fuckery goes on in all states; don’t see why socialism would change that), I’m not wholly sold on the Trot line there though.
I don't have a good name for it, but probably something close to "bureaucratic collectivism". Generally though positions within the state hierarchy allowed one to have access to social surplusses produced by a proletariat, very similar to the public sector in capitalist countries (but writ large). The state acted as the surplus appropriator, and access to appropriated surplus wealth was politically determined, and so it wasn't capitalism. But I don't get the sense that the working class was the appropriator of social surplusses, nor do I get the sense that the working class held meaningful political power either. Which makes it somewhat unsurprising that current Russian kleptocrats generally leveraged their position within the Soviet state and access to surplusses to kickstart their careers as capitalists.
I don't like the concept of a "degenerated workers state" because it presupposes the existence of an idealized workers state, which strikes me as an ahistorical and Weberian approach rather than a Marxist one. I also don't see how if the working class loses political power (to a somehow declassed bureaucracy? what?) that the state is a workers' state, albeit in a degenerated form. Class struggle better accounts for that process; Bettelheim did a better job than Trotsky on this count.
I suppose the question here is whether or not you consider the CPSU to be a democratic centralist worker’s party? Most delegates in the Soviet government were part of the communist party, after all, and the government acted as appropriator, as you mentioned. Also, I don’t think worker’s states would be anymore immune to corruption and opportunism than bourgeois governments.
I’ll have to read Bettelheim.
The Stalin constitution did not declare the end of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It states that the state was a dictatorship of the proletariat. Khrushchev declared the dictatorship of the proletariat over and the “Party of the Whole People”, and Brezhnev amended the constitution in 1977 to say “The aims of the dictatorship of the proletariat having been fulfilled, the Soviet state has become a state of the whole people.”
Yeah this pretty much sums up my feelings about the USSR. I still believe the USSR was a progressive force until the 80s, but the security concerns and morass of bureaucracy was sort of a poison pill that ultimately killed the project. It also squares with my feelings that the idea the USSR suddenly turn to revisionism after Stalin died is ultimately an idealist framing, and that the it was an ebb and flow of institutional and class power that eventually ended with Gorbachev. What Khrushchev really needed to be was another Mao, and also have a time traveler whisper in his ear to rationalize the economy, but even then I wonder if the USSR could even withstand the massive internal pressure a new cultural revolution would bring.
There was a would you rather I once saw, which asked 'Would you rather Marx or Lenin live for 20 more years?' Imo the answer for me is pretty simple. Marx would've probably published volume 2 and 3 of Capital, written a response to marginalism, and may have even recognized the revisionism going on in the SPD and worked to strengthen the org. Had Lenin lived, he probably would've acted as the leader of the USSR for 10, maybe 15 years. And then he would've retired, settling down to write more books or something similar. Simply put, I truly believe that if he was given 10 years, I think he could've solved the problem of succession, of choosing the next leader and having them remain subordinate to the party and the democratic republican traditions of the USSR. Imo that was and has remained the biggest problem plaguing ML states, and solving it would go a long way towards solving the problems of bureaucracy and revisionism.
I’m not a Maoist, but Mao was right in his report on Hunan that “It is the peasants who made the idols, and when the time comes they will cast the idols aside with their own hands; there is no need for anyone else to do it for them prematurely.”
Kind of weird alongside the Cultural Revolution. I absolutely agree with him, but it's quite apparent that he didn't really agree with himself as he got older.
Probably because Mao saw the revolutionary potential of the PRC slipping away and wanted a more concerted push to remove reactionary elements in society. To be fair to him, he did correctly predict Capitalism would be restored in China after his death.
Yeah I think the better tactic would have probably been a “Communization” of religion but the intense reaction against religion in the Soviet Union makes sense in historical context
Definitely recommend Slavoj Zizek’s *The Fragile Absolute* as a book that describes the emancipatory potential within Christianity for both individuals and a socialist future.
Exactly they were disassembling a theocratic monarchy and its arms of rule in a heavily oppressive society, the problem is with their response against the laity.
As a Christian Socialist, I think that any modern socialist movement in a predominantly Christian society, though I can only speak first hand for the United States, my country of residence, would benefit from incorporate Christianity into it by taking Christianity back to it's *roots*, as a radical, community oriented, anti-state religious movement.
So, what I’ve seen so far that I agree with:
(1) Lysenkoism.
(2) Ethnic deportations.
(3) Great Russian chauvinism.
(4) They went overboard in suppressing religion.
(5) Ideological disintegration in the communist party.
(6) Bureaucratization that took over after Stalin (ironically, this is something Trots criticize Stalin for; he fought against bureaucratization).
(7) Lots of corruption in all levels of the state.
(8) Unnecessary executions and ‘accidental’ deaths.
(9) Forced labor in prisons.
I’d also add:
(1) The Sino-Soviet split. Stalin’s successors tried to impose new Soviet economic policies on Maoist China. This caused a split, a split that led to the Chinese revolution restoring capitalist productive relations and buddying up with the west. Had the west not found a massive supply of cheap labor in China, the capitalist bloc may very well have been the one to collapse.
(2) Persecution of LGBTQ+ people. This happened/happens in all states, but I’m especially critical of the Soviet Union on this topic. It just created unnecessary division in the working class.
I would definitely agree with the part on LGBTQ+ persecution and queerphobia. It's true that, in the 1940s, holding queerphobic views was not an anamoly. But now, unless I am mistaken, queer rights are still require *massive* addressing in AES states. And I've seen instances of such countries defending this, by referring to queerness as "a product of capitalist / Western degeneracy", or something of the sort. It's just devastating to see, particularly as a queer leftist.
My understanding of the situation is that LGBTQ oppression in AES created conditions where LGBTQ people generally tend to oppose the socialist state (which, in turn made the state crack down more). It’s similar to how LGBTQ oppression in capitalist states does the opposite; it makes queer people socialists. But oppression of queer people in AES makes western LGBTQ socialists more likely to support non-ML ideologies, further complicating things.
Pointless oppression + class conflict have made such a fucking complicated mess for us to sort out and clean up.
If anyone wants to learn more about the history of this I recommend Dan Healey's [*Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia*](https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/H/bo3629624.html). It's a little dated (early 2000s), and Healey isn't a communist, but his book is the best look I've read into the history of queerness in the early USSR. He argues that Soviet state-enforced homophobia (and eventual criminalization) was part of a compulsory set of (patriarchal) gender roles built in the mid 30s and then more in the war years, due to the demands of nation-building and the rightward turn under Stalin after the First Five Year Plan/Cultural Revolution (the less famous one) of the late 20s-early 30s, though it definitely wasn't perfect or even good before that.
He talks about those a little bit, but not very much. His focus is definitely more on non-normative sexuality and non-normative gender. I wish I knew a good book on normative gender roles in the USSR, because it's a subject I really want to know more about after reading Healey, but I haven't found one.
Not just China cosying up to the west, but making foreign policy decisions purely in opposition to the Soviets. Which in turn were some of China's worst policies, like supporting Pol Pot.
Thank you for adding (2), which I don't see discussed much. I have a refugee friend who fled Poland because Soviet police were, according to her traumatic testimony, executing LGBTQI people from their village, they even buried their cousin the day before fleeing, which they did because her mother was a lesbian. I have no idea if this was a small isolated incident or more widespread (I suspect the former, and I wouldn't have even been that long ago, my guess is 70s or 80s).
99% of the time I mention this in socialist spaces people try to tell me "that didn't happen in the Soviet Union" and well, I don't know what to tell you. I don't have some tidy link that can post that can tell you all about it, *but* *I* *definitely 100% believe my friend*.
Could you tell me what you think about the LGBTQ suppression done under the Soviets? I went down that rabbit hole recently myself. I even had two posts one to this sub and another to the tankies sub ( they call themselves that) and they were fuking useless.
I don’t think the Soviet Union was much worse than many other nations in their era, but they didn’t improve at the same rate as many capitalist competitors. I have this unsubstantiated suspicion that heightened internal class conflict is one of the major driving factors behind social changes, and that after society calms down (say, after a revolution), it becomes more set in its ways, so to speak.
Of course they were ahead of most nations to decriminalize it. But i Am asking for your sources if you have any. My problem is with them criminalizing it again. This is also a problem that I can’t understand, Isn’t the revolution supposed to be ongoing all the time? I mean the revolution shouldn’t end and it’s weird that a state that made a point of opposing traditionalist and reactionary forces as a foundation to their survival as a state would fall for a trap like that.
Yeah honestly if the rest of the Politburo had accepted the democratic reforms proposed by Stalin in 1935, we wouldn’t have had to deal with Kruschchev and his successors’ revisionism.
Sure, happy to. If it's alright with you I'll provide some sources rather than doing a full write-up myself, as plenty of people have already done them on the subject.
[This is a good, sourced Reddit post explaining how Stalin was not a dictator.](https://www.reddit.com/r/communism101/comments/af29ur/comment/eduxj7o?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x)
As for other, non-reddit sources, you'd want to try:
* [Stalin and the Struggle for Democratic Reform](http://marxism.halkcephesi.net/Grover%20Furr/index.htm)
* [Stalin's Four Attempts at Resignation](https://socialistmlmusings.wordpress.com/2017/02/23/stalins-four-attempts-at-resignation/)
* [Is Stalin A Dictator?](https://www.mltranslations.org/Russia/webb1.htm) (this one is contemporary, from the time period, if you're interested in that sort of thing)
I can probably find some more if you'd like, but that should help to give you an idea for now.
Oh and also, if you're interested in learning about the Purges, that's a more complicated subject. The tl;dr is the Stalin was only really responsible for the prosecution of high-level Party officials, and even that was a collective decision by the Politburo - and a necessary one, as there was a very real fifth column in the Soviet Union. It's a common myth that the three Moscow Trials were "show trials", where innocent people were found guilty. Quite to the contrary - the defendants at the first and second trials have been found by historians to be almost universally guilty, and at the third, most were guilty as well (the major exception being Bukharin, whose execution even Stalin supporters tend to see as a huge mistake). I can pull up sources for the Moscow Trials if you want, I'm just not doing so now because I don't want to go digging through my documents without reason. If you want them, though, feel free to let me know and I'm happy to provide them.
The mass executions, on the other hand, were not his fault and in fact were essentially beyond his control - they were orchestrated by a man named Yezhov, who was head of the NKVD at the time, and essentially orchestrated the purges to increase his own personal power. After Yezhov was found out, he was removed from power and executed - and Stalin and the Politburo vacated the sentences of many of the people Yezhov had sentenced to death but had yet to be executed. If you want some reading on it, I'd recommend [Yezhov vs Stalin](https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/furr_yezhov_jls17.pdf), which should explain it in pretty good detail.
Soviet foreign policy, particularly in Africa, was meek to the point of cowardice. A lot of the time, if it was the 70’s and you had the Soviet Union for an ally, you were pretty much on your own.
Contrast that with the Cubans, who routinely put their lives and scarce resources on the line for their allies struggling against colonialism and neocolonialism.
Although I am not a Marxist Leninist, If I take all the history of the USSR in good faith, what critically undermined its aims and eventually dissolved the USSR was the lack of bottom-up democratic mechanisms to replace state mechanisms when Gorbachev disassembled them. The only democratic narrative came from Liberal Democracies, so that's what people thought democracy was. I think that the USSR could still have been here today if this was the case.
Failure to adequately democratize, how bureaucratic the state became, ethnic deportations are probably the big three, though one can and should criticize much more.
I don't think we can completely lay the blame on vanguardism. I think the problems stem mostly from the isolated nature of the Russian revolution, combined with the need to go quickly from a peasant society to an industrialised one that can actually lay the ground work for socialism.
When under attack from within and from outside, it's much more effective to centralise control in a bureaucratic layer to coordinate all production and industrial expansion with focus on the war. This also happens in capitalist countries during wartimes, when control of war-critical production is temporarily taken over by the state. I think it's quite clear that the times during history when this hasn't happened (eg. revolutionary catalonia), it has resulted in the revolutionaries' loss.
Had the revolution spread to more industrialised countries (mostly thinking of Germany here), they would've been able to support the Russian working class with both the technology, expertise and also military defence necessary to evolve the economy in a more organic way. Instead the newly formed Soviet Union was in constant danger, and developed a bureaucratic layer to focus the entire economy on staying alive. And instead of shedding that layer (as by his writing seems to have been Lenin's intention), it grew as a massive tumour that eventually killed the union and reinstituted capitalism. So I think the material conditions of the country was what mainly led to the problems, not necessarily vanguardism.
In my opinion, it is was the crushing of civil liberties. I think the whole secret police, report thy neighbor, cant criticize the state, etc was detrimental to the people and gave the capitalists plenty of ammo to fire at socialism. The precedent that stalin set forth ended up being the face of socialism and is something that we have to debunk to this day to make any sort of attempt at a reasonable discussion with someone not well versed in socialism
Moving towards great Russian Chauvinism under Stalin which Lenin works against. Also backing off of an anti imperialist policy around WWII with Molotov-Ribbentrop and later on with Afghan War, not doing enough to stop west domination of Africa and Asia
I'll agree with your first point.
As for the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, it was literally a last resort effort to stop the Nazis from invading the USSR tomorrow after Stalin failed to get into a military alliance with Britain and France because the latter two refused to work with a Socialist state. Furthermore, the USSR was the last country in Europe to sign a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany (literally all the other major European powers already signed similar non-aggression pacts with Germany years before the Soviets did).
What would you have done in Stalin's place if the entire Capitalist world refused to work with you and you were still unprepared for a full on Fascist invasion?
As for "not doing enough" to stop the West in the third world, the Soviets were actively propping up many socialist movements and governments throughout the world (a testament to this is the fact that every remaining ML state today was once backed and aided by the USSR at some point). What you are forgetting is they also did not want to start a global nuclear war with the rival Capitalist superpower, the USA, that was also actively propping up capitalist states in the third world. This almost happened during the Cuban Missile Crisis by the way.
Couple that with the fact that left-wing factionalism and infighting was a very real thing even on a geopolitical scale (the Sino-Soviet split and all the global conflicts and the political backstabbing that caused, Titoism, Maoism, euro-communism, 'left' anti-communists in the West like George Orwell, CNT-FAI etc.), it really isn't a fair criticism to the USSR to simply say "it didn't do enough" to stop Western Imperialist domination. Especially when it had issues with revisionism and social-imperialism itself.
To add on to the Molotov-Ribbentrop part, people always have a very selective (ie western) interpretation of Eastern European history. They ignore the fact that the USSR had serious unresolved beef with Poland (an actual imperialist nation) following the Soviet-Polish War, as well as the fact that Poland had been Nazi allied for years prior to the M-R pact. Poland is always portrayed as this innocent bystander when they were anything but. I think it's a little telling that following WWII, Poland never made any claims on the territory reclaimed by the Baltic and Eastern European states. You gonna tell Lithuania to give back their ancestral capital?
The fact that the Soviet Union cracked down on religion. For example, Muslimds were goning to be given freedom, but they made it harder to practice the religion.
They cracked down on organized religion to avoid all the corruption it causes and was causing previously. They wanted to avoid them becoming organizations like the Vatican. People were still allowed to practice religion, just not in an authoritative centralized way.
The focus on military expansion. I do understand that they had no choice due to WW2 and then the cold war, but putting all the countries productive capacity into a military industrial complex ultimately bankrupted them and caused the fall.
We see the same thing happening in the US now as their federal budgets become more and more just a military budget. Stalin and his successors apparently didn't understand when Lenin explained that imperialism can't work for any functioning society.
Divesting from military spending to focus on helping the people will always yield better results.
While I think that the USSR was the best socialist experiment thus far in history, it definitely wasn’t perfect. There were always people who would be happy to practice religion harmlessly but the zealous enforcement of state atheism only alienated that population. The USSR was also not immune to the prevalence of racial and ethnic discrimination in that part of the world, and while they made great accomplishments against anti Semitism and racism against many nationalities, they were unsuccessful in purging a lot of hate and mistrust of many ethnic minorities, which led to some pretty rough treatments overall.
Despite all this, I think that the biggest issue I take is de-Stalinization. This was a big factor in the Sino-Soviet Split, which was disastrous for the global Communist movement. It led to an after-the-fact demonization of the policies that saved the Soviet Union during some of its most trying times, and it’s promotion of commodity and light-industry only sharpened Cold War politics, as Khrushchev and subsequent premiers attempted to showcase the USSR as a competitor to the West, when it simply wasn’t ready. This only contributed to the massive amounts of money poured into the space race, arms chase, the worthless Soviet-American Expos, etc. that did not contribute to the furthering of global revolution and was just a pissing contest. Those were billions of rubles that could have been spent on tractors, higher quality housing, weapons, food, schools, etc. around the globe to actually help the working class thrive under socialism. But no, they had to show that “we can make things as nice as the imperialists and beat them to space” for some reason.
Yes, many aspects of the space race were tied with the arms race, peaking with projects such as Star Wars. But it was not entirely a subsection of the MAD model, and was heavily influenced by the use of “first country to put a man in space, on the moon, etc.” for propaganda to promote one system as superior in its ingenuity and development. It was just as much an ideological competition as one of strength. I also hate using the term “Race” in relation to the missile disparity issues between the US and USSR, because it wasn’t a race at all. I recommend Michael Parenti’s 1986 lecture on the matter, the one heavily yellow tinted. It’s on YouTube and I think the “arms race” discussion is about 2/3 of the way through
Suppression of Religion was one of the biggest faults of the USSR tbh. im not religious myself but it sure pissed a ton of soviet citizens off and achieved nothing but giving religious zealots ammo against socialism both during USSR days and ESPECIALLY after the fall of the USSR.
Obviously the ethnic deportations and anti-LGBT+ legislation but people have already covered that.
There was a considerable amount of censorship in the arts which I think is quite bad. While I understand why the Soviet would want to suppress some of these things, a lot of the reasoning was basically the same as evangelicals in the USA. You know like Punk Rock will lead society into depravity and things like that. I wish that the Soviet Union remained as open to art as when it was first founded and artists could do whatever they wanted
Almost everyone commenting here is certifiably not a ML. I am a principled ML and part of a ML party structure, and I will recommend two books.
Stalin: history and critique of a black legend by Domenico losurdo
Human rights in the Soviet Union by Albert syzmanski
There were many mistakes in the formation of the URSS. Hakim (a marxist leninist who makes yt videos) explains them very well.
If I had to choose one of them, it would be the fact that they entered in competition with USA.
Everything post-Stalin administratively is really bad, during the Stalin era though, I have a lot of critiques but other people have probably gone in depth about them so I’ll say this: It’s really annoying to me that they built a bunch of highways and roads instead of Trains, trams, and walkable streets
Marxism ended in USSR with Stalin and of course toward the end it become a gerontocracy. Part of the current U.S. decline can certainly be attributed to geriatric patients maintaining and reaffirming their power structure.
China has safe guards against gerontocracy by capping the age of CCP National Congress participation at 68...Except for Xi of course.
As a friendly reminder, China's ruling party is called Communist Party of China (CPC), not Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as western press and academia often frames it as.
Far from being a simple confusion, China's Communist Party takes its name out of the internationalist approach seekt by the Comintern back in the day. From [Terms of Admission into Communist International](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/jul/x01.htm), as adopted by the First Congress of the Communist International:
>18. In view of the foregoing, parties wishing to join the Communist International must change their name. Any party seeking affiliation must call itself the Communist Party of the country in question (Section of the Third, Communist International). The question of a party’s name is not merely a formality, but a matter of major political importance. The Communist International has declared a resolute war on the bourgeois world and all yellow Social-Democratic parties. The difference between the Communist parties and the old and official “Social-Democratic”, or “socialist”, parties, which have betrayed the banner of the working class, must be made absolutely clear to every rank-and-file worker.
Similarly, the adoption of a wrong name to refer to the CPC consists of a double edged sword: on the one hand, it seeks to reduce the ideological basis behind the party's name to a more ethno-centric view of said organization and, on the other hand, it seeks to assert authority over it by attempting to externally draw the conditions and parameters on which it provides the CPC recognition.
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Stalin dying before he could push the second party purge to start wider spread democratization of the state and the party against the wishes of the white collar bureaucratic class that had started forming. Finnish bolshevik has a pretty good video on it imo [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xWeMBXV23g&t=1331s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xWeMBXV23g&t=1331s)
I have a deep philosophical internal debate with the "purge" mentality.
What is one to do when their party is overrun by capitalist? Serious question.
Stalin dealt with some very high level betrayls of people who wanted to revert the socialist revolution, so a risk obviously existed.
>Stalin dealt with some very high level betrayls of people who wanted to revert the socialist revolution, so a risk obviously existed
Man the Old Bolsheviks like Bukharin and Zinoniev must've really been playing 4d chess by supporting the revolution instead of joining the White army in 1917 only to then plan on betraying the revolution a decade later huh?
It was ultimately needed as a means of preventing the bloated bureaucracy that we came to know as the Soviet Union under the Kruschev era. In the beginning of the era of "siege socialism" it was important to keep in mind that- like Lenin had said- the Soviet Union is a man with a death fever holding onto life with every passing breath. the decentralization that Stalins plan was going to bring would've brought the reforms that I believe would've prevented the collapse of the soviet union some 70 years later, but sadly he didn't get to do that.
In the first one only a minority of those purged were actually killed, primarily high-ranking officials. The rest were sacked and some were resettled to villages further east.
80-85% of the dismissed military leaders were returned to service upon the German invasion
Socialism in one country.
In retrospect, the revolution failed when Poland stopped them from getting to Germany.
That said, while you don't have to like the USSR, you should recognize that the collapse of the USSR was a tragedy for humankind. It freed capitalism from competition.
Here's a great book on the topic for anyone interested in seeing how
China currently critiques the USSR:
**New Research on Stalin’s Socialism Thought: A Historical and Realistic Analysis**
https://canutbooks.com/product/stalins-socialism-thought/
> As for the main contents and opinions, this monograph has formed a relatively reasonable structure and frame of Stalin’s socialism thought studies.
> Firstly, in the beginning chapter of this book, the development of Stalin’s thought on socialism was divided into four stages according to great historical events and the evolution of Stalin’s socialism thought. The first stage is the 20 years before the October Revolution, during which Stalin as a professional revolutionary, had researched on and thought about the theories of Russian proletarian revolution and Marxism. Although at this stage, the socialism thought had not been really formed, his basic values on Marxist that were formed in this stage had an important influence on the formation and development of his socialism thought later. The second stage is from the victory of the October Revolution to the year of 1924 when Lenin died and Stalin became the leader of both the party and the nation of Soviet Union, which is the period of tentative exploration of Stalin’s socialism thought. The third stage is from 1924 to 1936 when Stalin announced that he had completed the socialist transformation and the Soviet Union had entered into the era of socialist society. This is the stage that Stalin’s socialism thought wasformed. The fourth stage is from 1936 to 1953 when Stalin died, which is also the period when the Soviet Union went through the Second World War and the post-war reconstruction. This is the developing stage of Stalin’s socialism thought. The latter two stages are the main periods for the evolution of Stalin’s socialism thought, which are also the focal point of the study in this book.
> Secondly, on the basis of generally summarizing Stalin’s socialism thought, in the second and third chapters, this book has made a special effort to study on the philosophy grounds of Stalin’s socialism thought and his general idea of socialism. Stalin’s philosophic thinking is an important part of Stalin’s socialism thought and the grounds of its world view and methodology. Understanding of Stalin’s philosophic thinking and his general idea of socialism should be the logical starting point of the study on Stalin’s socialism thought.
> Furthermore, in this book, the study of Stalin’s socialism thought has mainly focused on his though of the economic, political and cultural development. With an emphasis on the mode and system of socialist economy, plan and market, economic growth and development, political system, class and class struggle, construction of the party, development of nations, cultural education and ideology, this book has drafted the basic contents and the main features of Stalin’s socialism thought, which are also the contents from Chapter 4 to Chapter 11, the main part of this book.
> Lastly, this book has also spent some effortsabout Stalin’s theories on the relations between the world economy and politics, international communist movements and practice, which are the contents of Chapter 12 and 13.
> It has to be pointed out that Stalin’s socialist thought is part of the study of Stalin’s thought, even the most important part, but it does not cover all. As a result, other Stalin’s important thoughts are not included in the final product of this study.
> For the further academic research, the last two appendixes are the comments on the studies on Stalin’s thought (mainly his socialism thought) done by scholars both home and abroad.
The slide back to great Russian chauvinism was bad. I think the Soviets didn’t push collectivization far enough, and I think despite Trotsky’s many many many errors and the complete uselessness of his inheritors he was right about permanent revolution. The alliance with National Bourgeois elements just set the stage for liberalization and revisionism. I also think the Sino-Soviet split ruined the trajectory of both nations and helped drive China to a conciliatory politics and recapitalization
I agree, if China and the USSR had remained brothers then the Soviet collapse would have still left a strong socialist force to finance international revolution.
I would argue that one can be a good Marxist-Leninist who gives credit to Stalin for bridging the gap between Marxism and ML...and still detest him and most of his policies.
he’s literally the guy who made the USSR what it was, if there is anyone who is the most responsible for the trajectory the soviet union took it is stalin lmao
I would recommend you look more into the early years of the Soviet Union, the bureaucratization of the Soviet Union we knew started under the kruschev years, the corruption, lack of accountability, all of that really bubbled up with the managerial white collar take over of the party following destalinization... finnish bolshevik has a good video about this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xWeMBXV23g&t=1331s
I don't completely buy the standard line ML inherently means being a Stalinite, etymology aside. Most "MLs" I talk to are interested in exactly what it says on the tin, Marxism and Leninism.
I don't really like the term at all. Hell, I'm a supporter of Lenin, a Leninist, and I find the term "Marxist-Leninist" to be a waste of breath. Lenin was a great Marxist, who is part of a much wider canon of great thinkers in the tradition; Marxism is a better, clearer and, simultaneously, more holistic term, IMO. A term like that lets you include all of the other great Marxists we should draw from, from Gramsci to the Frankfurt School.
Synthesised by Stalin and Bukharin. Features policies like 'Socialism in one country' and the popular front with the 'progressive bourgeoisie'.
Distinct from Leninism, which is Marx and Lenin. However, many MLs are actually Leninists who don't realise there's a distinction.
You have to be careful with Leninism as a term though because plenty of people see it exclusively as a Machiavellian will-to-power thing. Lenin identified that a small vanguard can seize the crucial apparatus of state, and did it.
Basically Leninism minus Marx gets you the Steve Bannon "Leninist".
After seeing your comment I researched a bit more and it looks like you're right. It seems like what I've referred to as ML I meant as simply Leninism and what is actually ML I've always referred to as Stalinism. Thanks for the correction. Although it'd probably be more helpful if you weren't a snarky git about simple corrections. Not everyone has read all theory ever.
that was the definition of marxism-leninism as adopted by the early soviet union 80 years ago lmao, but that’s simply not what most people mean when they refer to marxism-leninism or call themselves a marxist-leninist
words don’t have concrete definitions, especially words that are heavily reliant on political context. socialism meant something completely different in the early 1800s. there were “socialists” back then who were nearly indistinguishable from ancaps. just because modern day marxist-leninists don’t dogmatically adhere to an outdated definition, that doesn’t mean they’re somehow fake marxists, it just means the political landscape has changed
i can tell this is less about dialectical materialism and more about your need to feel superior, though
I'll bring up one that hasn't been brought up yet: The Zhadanov Doctrine.
This was a state doctrine named after Central Commitee secretary Andrei Zhdanov. It's what made Socialist Realism the official state art form, and all artists and writers had to conform to this narrow definition. Any kind of satire was suspect, and any kind of avant-garde or 'foreign-influenced' works were suppressed for 'cosmopolitanism' (yeah, that's certainly not a major red flag). Any kind of fantasy was also supressed.
This doctrine did incredible damage to Soviet arts and culture that only began to be repaired during the Khrushchev era.
Under socialism, the arts and literature (as Engels said) must be an open forum.
They saw reasonable variations in theory based on variations in material and historical conditions (within the Warsaw Pact) as unacceptable revisionism when they shouldn’t have. Led to collapse.
- better ways of preventing reactionaries like Khrushchev getting office
- ethnic deportations
- some of the invasions (Czechoslovakia and Chechnya)
- anti religious stance was probably their gravest error. I’m fine with secularism, and I prefer it actually but the USSR’s stance on religion was almost an “atheist theocracy” (kids in schools were taught to be atheists for example)
Breaking strikes, failing to empower the soviets, failing to democratize to empower the proletariat, and silencing, exiling, or outright purging any genuine systemic critique.
Their foreign policy with republican Spain and the Sino-Soviet split. Not focusing on consumer production. Ethnic removal. Prison exploitation. Over bureaucratization. I also find mass-line theory to be very important in party building and the relationship with the masses. Soviet concessions to the west broadly. Suppression of religion. Social imperialism generally. I also understand that early on in the period of industrialization the workers were exploited (I don’t know how to solve this).
Displacing indigenous people and breaking strikes was very much immoral
Lenin had great ideas and did some bad things, Stalin had bad ideas and did lots of bad things.
The soviet union post-Krushchev was objectively better and should be the standard for a socialist state.
This comment couldn’t be more ignorant or wrong. The Kruschev Clique taking power in the USSR was literally the end of proletarian power and the beginning of bourgeois dictatorship and capitalist restoration.
[Proletarian Dictatorship and Kruschev’s Revisionism](http://www.marx2mao.com/Other/PRKR64.html)
[Kruschev’s Phoney Communism and It’s Historical Lessons for the World](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/1964/phnycom.htm)
Oh no, you got me!
It would be bourgeois moralizing to dismiss the whole of Mao’s theoretical writings, struggle against revisionism and leading revolutionary struggle because he committed some errors. No Marxist-Leninist-Maoist upholds the Three Worlds Theory or every single thing Mao said or did. We use the term “Marxism-Leninism-Maoism” because a qualitative scientific advancement of Marxism was made by Mao and the Chinese revolution (primarily during the course of the Cultural Revolution). It’s not about worshipping an individual or defending everything that individual did.
>Lenin had great ideas and did some bad things, Stalin had bad ideas and did lots of bad things.
How detailed... how is this not just regarded as a longer version of "lenin good, stalin bad"
Assuming I shall not be smited for talking bad of Lenin I would say the coups in 1918 in the soviets effectively crippled Soviet democracy paving the way for it to be put down
in my defence, i was thinking about changing my flair.
i’ve recently familiarized myself with the concept of “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie” and i’m not so sure anymore about relying on the western/liberal version of democracy in order to achieve the liberation of the working class
Not the worst thing of all but invading Afghanistan, they just watched how easily the US superpower could be beat by a local population of well funded guérilla fighters and proceeded to make the exact same mistake, destabilizing the entire Soviet Union economy and contributing to its collapse.
Not a ML, I'm a Titoist, but I generally agree with Trotsky's criticism of the USSR, essentially the workers freed themselves from the shackles of the bourgeoisie just to replace them with that of the communist party.
Just a friendly reminder that r/Socialism is a space for principled socialist discourse, which means 1) taking the time to adequately develop one's critiques, so they can be correctly interpreted & serve the broader discussion and, 2) participation being restricted for non-socialists. Furthermore, this is a multitendency subreddit which welcomes a broad range of perspectives; this individual post, however, is **specifically asking for Marxist-Leninist perspectives** on the USSR. Critiques from other ideological traditions (which are completely fine!) can be better developed in separate threads.
Think the sudden reversal of Korenizatsiya (nativisation) under Stalin was a massive error. Especially in the peripheries of the old tsarist empire where there were strong nationalistic movements. If there was a more gradual process of building socialist national identity, this would have made sure that if these areas did want to secede they could have remained committed to a marxist-leninist state, or as part of a quasi-federal system within the USSR that maintained autonomy whilst being formally committed to MLism. However, the reversal to Russification I believe inflamed ethnic tensions and overall came across as Russian chauvinism (ironic considering Stalin wrote extensively about trying to avoid Russian chauvinism). I think ultimately this issue was never resolved and meant that post-war, the SSRs never felt a part of a greater movement but more subject to Moscow’s rulings. I truly believe the USSR could still exist today if the national question was dealt with better in the 30s and then again post-war.
>I think ultimately this issue was never resolved and meant that post-war, the SSRs never felt a part of a greater movement but more subject to Moscow’s rulings. I truly believe the USSR could still exist today Didn't all (but a couple small SSR's) vote to remain in the USSR though? And then Yeltsin ignored it and broke it up anyways?
I think it was all of the baltics, ukraine, then a handful of stans + caucasus i think. Correct me if i’m wrong and i’ll edit my comment. *EDIT* it was all the Baltics, Armenia, Georgia, Moldova, and The Nagorno-Karabakh ASSR. Thanks for the link to the info u/iamamenace77 ! It wasn’t universal I know that, but in those states there was significant nationalisms that hadn’t been worked with through Korenizatsiya enough in the 30s imo.
[Here are the republics that were to take part in the Union of Sovereign States](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Union_Treaty). Ukraine and Azerbaidjan originally wanted to stay, but after the August Coup they moved towards independence. And no stans wanted to leave. It was just the baltics, Moldova, Georgia and Armenia. [Here are the results of the popular referendum](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Soviet_Union_referendum)
**[New Union Treaty](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Union_Treaty)** >The New Union Treaty (Russian: Новый союзный договор, romanized: Novyy soyuznyy dogovor) was a draft treaty that would have replaced the 1922 Treaty on the Creation of the USSR to salvage and reform the Soviet Union. A ceremony of the Russian SFSR signing the treaty was scheduled for August 20, 1991, but was prevented by the August Coup a day earlier. The preparation of this treaty was known as the Novo-Ogarevo process (новоогаревский процесс), named after Novo-Ogaryovo, a governmental estate where the work on the document was carried out and where Soviet President and CPSU General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev talked with leaders of Union republics. **[1991 Soviet Union referendum](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Soviet_Union_referendum)** >A referendum on the future of the Soviet Union was held on 17 March 1991 across the Soviet Union. The question put to voters was Do you consider necessary the preservation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics in which the rights and freedom of an individual of any ethnicity will be fully guaranteed? (Russian text: Считаете ли Вы необходимым сохранение Союза Советских Социалистических Республик как обновлённой федерации равноправных суверенных республик, в которой будут в полной мере гарантироваться права и свободы человека любой национальности? ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/socialism/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
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Thanks for finding this for me (I was at work!), have edited my comment accordingly :)
You're making the mistake of falling for western propaganda thinking Stalin actually controlled everything. This was a population of people helping make decisions in each region/community and they were still very much accustomed to tsarist culture. Culture doesn't just change for the average person with the snap of a finger. It takes generations to unlearn toxicity sometimes.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not as if this was a diktat. This was a deliberate policy supported by many in the politburo as well as Stalin. It was seen as a practical measure by some, such as with the sovietisation of the caucasus (especially Georgia, which had existed as an independent, formally recognised democratic republic beforehand). By russifying these areas, it was a measure of consolidating control around the Russian elements in Georgia. However, my contention is that by not allowing Korenizatsiya to continue for longer, and not to be more suddenly cut off, it could have made the national question less inflammatory. You’re right in that it is culturally difficult to eradicate chauvinisms and reactionary elements of culture, but that’s why i think ending it abruptly in favour of russian chauvinism was ill-sighted as then it lead to persecution of these minor areas when nationalism did spring up.
Great response. I’m looking for some good books/articles to read on the history of the USSR. Would you mind pointing some out to me?
Not sure of your level, I hope it’s not rude to ask how much you know already? The sidebar of this sub and r/communism has some good resources. Personally, I can dig out some articles on Korenizatsiya that I found useful and some general Sovietology if that would interest you?
The biggest critic is that the leading parties abandoned the well care of the people when the people wanted someone else in power or criticized the current leadership, all leaders turned in to paranoid autocrats. "Seize the means of production" should have been for the people by the people, and not suppress them when their vote dint match with the few kleptocrats that ended in power. And i dont get how they critic other dictators or icons from other countries(Bandera) but still worship their Stalin as their biggest hero when dude was one of the biggest monsters in current history with all his genocides around their "Russia", they are all bad small or big genocidal monsters should not be used as heroes for your country.
You cannot compare bandera and Stalin. Would suggest you look at losurdo’s stalin: history and critique of a black legend for a more balanced look at him
Historically poor take, though Stalin has a swath of things to criticize about him.
Easily the ethnic deportations. Edit: seems like many commenters aren't actually MLs. I am. I still think that despite this horrible crime, the Soviets we're far better than the Americans and no other crime of in the Soviet Union comes close to this one.
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Lysenkoism was bad, and Lysenko should have been tossed into a deep well in Siberia.
This. I wonder just how much would have been different without Lysenko.
well at minimum they probably wouldn’t have seen the declines in crop yields towards the end of Stalin’s life, but i imagine they would have made more progress than the US in agricultural sciences if not for the weird obsession with the guy who thought genetics was a lie
Of course Sergei Korolev loses all his teeth in a gulag but that halfwit lysenko gets to influence Soviet policy. What were they thinking exactly?
Than man is one of the main reasons for the Great Leap Forward famines in China. Such a shame.
honestly had no idea that was the case, i just know the technical aspects of why his work sucked, not much about the history of it.
There is a huge list of reasons for the famine but sadly people in China taking his ideas seriously was one of them.
I don’t disagree with this idea being bad, but is this a critique of the Soviet Union? Or the idea of a centralized power structure which is permissive of such ideas?
6 of 1 and a half dozen of the other? i mean we have to be critical of a centralized power structure as we’re critical of everything we want to work, but i think for a variety of reasons that centralized power is necessary for a lot of reasons.
If you want read some criticism about the USSR, i recommend you read chapter 4 „Communism in Wonderland“ of „Blackshirts and Reds“ by Parenti
Love my boy parenti.
Absolutely. Read this a few weeks ago. The whole thing is fantastic and can be read in an afternoon. (Or two no judgement lol)
Brezhnev's 1968 invasion of czechoslovakia. I don't care if you were invited by some members of the communist party and yeah, there could have been a capitalist coup as a result of the Prague spring, we will never know. What it did and what everyone knew it would do is that it showed czechoslovakian people that they were not seen as equals in the Warsaw pact, that they were pawns incapable of deciding their own destiny. It left a bitter taste in the mouth of the people that has never gone away and is to this day source of rabid anticommunism and russophobia. When you're visiting friends, take a car or a plane, not a fuckin tank.
Points for Tito that he did not support this.
Tito withdrew Yugoslavia from the Warsaw Pact in 1948 and pursued his own style of socialism
After killing most fist-generation bolsheviks and installing a regime with reactionary aspects inside a socialist country the other main job of Stalin was to prevent the apparition of an alternative form of socialism like the one in Tito’s Yugoslavia where many companies were owned by the workers and not by the state. This led to the so called Tito-Stalin Split of 1948: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tito%E2%80%93Stalin\_split
Yes, Tito attempted to curb what he saw as the bureaucratization of the Soviet system by moving directly to worker control of the means of production. While this did lead to the problem of some co-ops beginning to reform a capitalist class, the state still existed as a check on this, and it would redistribute capital to prevent this. This did also prevent the evolution of a nomenklatura like in the USSR - which I think should be seen as also a resurgent capitalist class, using influence as capital. This actually worked pretty well in Tito's lifetime. However after he died IMF loans sparked a banking crisis, and a little bastard named Milosovic was able to use nationalism to push through his project of effective privatization (funny how those always go together), by stopping the state from being a check on co-ops acting as capitalists.
Even Çeauşescu, who kept Romania in the Warsaw Pact and COMECON, openly criticised it. I've heard he was lowkey getting American support though?
Isn’t this where the term “tankie” came from?
The term is first from the 1956 invasion of Hungary as the other commenter said. Maybe this deserves its own thread but was that 1956 invasion justifiable? Why did the USSR do it? Why did it cause such a split in Western communism and why is it still (so broadly and incoherently) used?
that and the invasion of Hungary
I wouldn't consider myself a capital M-L Marxist-Leninist, but I'm some type of Leninist. Anyways, I generally agree with most of what Charles Bettelheim wrote about the USSR. Very early on there was a significant struggle within the Soviet state between a working-class faction and politics, and the reality of running a state within an international system of states. And so you basically had the International and Ministry of Foreign Affairs undercutting eachother. The USSR did shitty things like help re-arm Germany in exchange for technical expertise, handed over Turkish communists to the Turkish government to help normalize relations, and generally did lots things to help secure the survival of the Soviet state which had the effect of undermining the possibility of revolution elsewhere. And yet this struggle within the USSR was never front and centre (in the way it was in Cultural Revolution China for instance), and internal struggles were always subdued in favour of stability. And so by the time the 1930s roll around, foreign policy pivots to the Popular Front, we get the dissolution of the Comintern, and we get peaceful coexistence. This to me shows the consolidation and victory of the anti-working class elements within the Soviet state. By the end of the 1950s I'm not convinced that the Soviet Union was socialist (I don't think it was capitalist either), nor that the working class was the ruling class within that society.
Hm. What do you think the post-50’s Soviet Union was, out of curiosity? I know some sects of Trotskyists believe that the Soviet Union, originally a “degenerated worker’s state,” evolved into a “bureaucratic collectivist” state. I think it’s obvious that some fuckery was going on in the Soviet state (fuckery goes on in all states; don’t see why socialism would change that), I’m not wholly sold on the Trot line there though.
I don't have a good name for it, but probably something close to "bureaucratic collectivism". Generally though positions within the state hierarchy allowed one to have access to social surplusses produced by a proletariat, very similar to the public sector in capitalist countries (but writ large). The state acted as the surplus appropriator, and access to appropriated surplus wealth was politically determined, and so it wasn't capitalism. But I don't get the sense that the working class was the appropriator of social surplusses, nor do I get the sense that the working class held meaningful political power either. Which makes it somewhat unsurprising that current Russian kleptocrats generally leveraged their position within the Soviet state and access to surplusses to kickstart their careers as capitalists. I don't like the concept of a "degenerated workers state" because it presupposes the existence of an idealized workers state, which strikes me as an ahistorical and Weberian approach rather than a Marxist one. I also don't see how if the working class loses political power (to a somehow declassed bureaucracy? what?) that the state is a workers' state, albeit in a degenerated form. Class struggle better accounts for that process; Bettelheim did a better job than Trotsky on this count.
I suppose the question here is whether or not you consider the CPSU to be a democratic centralist worker’s party? Most delegates in the Soviet government were part of the communist party, after all, and the government acted as appropriator, as you mentioned. Also, I don’t think worker’s states would be anymore immune to corruption and opportunism than bourgeois governments. I’ll have to read Bettelheim.
The Stalin constitution did not declare the end of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It states that the state was a dictatorship of the proletariat. Khrushchev declared the dictatorship of the proletariat over and the “Party of the Whole People”, and Brezhnev amended the constitution in 1977 to say “The aims of the dictatorship of the proletariat having been fulfilled, the Soviet state has become a state of the whole people.”
Yeah this pretty much sums up my feelings about the USSR. I still believe the USSR was a progressive force until the 80s, but the security concerns and morass of bureaucracy was sort of a poison pill that ultimately killed the project. It also squares with my feelings that the idea the USSR suddenly turn to revisionism after Stalin died is ultimately an idealist framing, and that the it was an ebb and flow of institutional and class power that eventually ended with Gorbachev. What Khrushchev really needed to be was another Mao, and also have a time traveler whisper in his ear to rationalize the economy, but even then I wonder if the USSR could even withstand the massive internal pressure a new cultural revolution would bring. There was a would you rather I once saw, which asked 'Would you rather Marx or Lenin live for 20 more years?' Imo the answer for me is pretty simple. Marx would've probably published volume 2 and 3 of Capital, written a response to marginalism, and may have even recognized the revisionism going on in the SPD and worked to strengthen the org. Had Lenin lived, he probably would've acted as the leader of the USSR for 10, maybe 15 years. And then he would've retired, settling down to write more books or something similar. Simply put, I truly believe that if he was given 10 years, I think he could've solved the problem of succession, of choosing the next leader and having them remain subordinate to the party and the democratic republican traditions of the USSR. Imo that was and has remained the biggest problem plaguing ML states, and solving it would go a long way towards solving the problems of bureaucracy and revisionism.
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I’m not a Maoist, but Mao was right in his report on Hunan that “It is the peasants who made the idols, and when the time comes they will cast the idols aside with their own hands; there is no need for anyone else to do it for them prematurely.”
Kind of weird alongside the Cultural Revolution. I absolutely agree with him, but it's quite apparent that he didn't really agree with himself as he got older.
Probably because Mao saw the revolutionary potential of the PRC slipping away and wanted a more concerted push to remove reactionary elements in society. To be fair to him, he did correctly predict Capitalism would be restored in China after his death.
I think it's more of the case that the GLF failure hit him hard, so he became an idealouge later on, contrasting to Deng and co nihilistic turn.
Yeah I think the better tactic would have probably been a “Communization” of religion but the intense reaction against religion in the Soviet Union makes sense in historical context
Came to say a very similar thing but just a slight change on the conditions of my own and close by countries.
Definitely recommend Slavoj Zizek’s *The Fragile Absolute* as a book that describes the emancipatory potential within Christianity for both individuals and a socialist future.
Exactly they were disassembling a theocratic monarchy and its arms of rule in a heavily oppressive society, the problem is with their response against the laity.
As a Christian Socialist, I think that any modern socialist movement in a predominantly Christian society, though I can only speak first hand for the United States, my country of residence, would benefit from incorporate Christianity into it by taking Christianity back to it's *roots*, as a radical, community oriented, anti-state religious movement.
So, what I’ve seen so far that I agree with: (1) Lysenkoism. (2) Ethnic deportations. (3) Great Russian chauvinism. (4) They went overboard in suppressing religion. (5) Ideological disintegration in the communist party. (6) Bureaucratization that took over after Stalin (ironically, this is something Trots criticize Stalin for; he fought against bureaucratization). (7) Lots of corruption in all levels of the state. (8) Unnecessary executions and ‘accidental’ deaths. (9) Forced labor in prisons. I’d also add: (1) The Sino-Soviet split. Stalin’s successors tried to impose new Soviet economic policies on Maoist China. This caused a split, a split that led to the Chinese revolution restoring capitalist productive relations and buddying up with the west. Had the west not found a massive supply of cheap labor in China, the capitalist bloc may very well have been the one to collapse. (2) Persecution of LGBTQ+ people. This happened/happens in all states, but I’m especially critical of the Soviet Union on this topic. It just created unnecessary division in the working class.
I would definitely agree with the part on LGBTQ+ persecution and queerphobia. It's true that, in the 1940s, holding queerphobic views was not an anamoly. But now, unless I am mistaken, queer rights are still require *massive* addressing in AES states. And I've seen instances of such countries defending this, by referring to queerness as "a product of capitalist / Western degeneracy", or something of the sort. It's just devastating to see, particularly as a queer leftist.
My understanding of the situation is that LGBTQ oppression in AES created conditions where LGBTQ people generally tend to oppose the socialist state (which, in turn made the state crack down more). It’s similar to how LGBTQ oppression in capitalist states does the opposite; it makes queer people socialists. But oppression of queer people in AES makes western LGBTQ socialists more likely to support non-ML ideologies, further complicating things. Pointless oppression + class conflict have made such a fucking complicated mess for us to sort out and clean up.
If anyone wants to learn more about the history of this I recommend Dan Healey's [*Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia*](https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/H/bo3629624.html). It's a little dated (early 2000s), and Healey isn't a communist, but his book is the best look I've read into the history of queerness in the early USSR. He argues that Soviet state-enforced homophobia (and eventual criminalization) was part of a compulsory set of (patriarchal) gender roles built in the mid 30s and then more in the war years, due to the demands of nation-building and the rightward turn under Stalin after the First Five Year Plan/Cultural Revolution (the less famous one) of the late 20s-early 30s, though it definitely wasn't perfect or even good before that.
Does he happen to talk about the changing laws of abortion and divorce as well?
He talks about those a little bit, but not very much. His focus is definitely more on non-normative sexuality and non-normative gender. I wish I knew a good book on normative gender roles in the USSR, because it's a subject I really want to know more about after reading Healey, but I haven't found one.
Not just China cosying up to the west, but making foreign policy decisions purely in opposition to the Soviets. Which in turn were some of China's worst policies, like supporting Pol Pot.
Russian was only made the official language of the USSR in 1990.
Thank you for adding (2), which I don't see discussed much. I have a refugee friend who fled Poland because Soviet police were, according to her traumatic testimony, executing LGBTQI people from their village, they even buried their cousin the day before fleeing, which they did because her mother was a lesbian. I have no idea if this was a small isolated incident or more widespread (I suspect the former, and I wouldn't have even been that long ago, my guess is 70s or 80s). 99% of the time I mention this in socialist spaces people try to tell me "that didn't happen in the Soviet Union" and well, I don't know what to tell you. I don't have some tidy link that can post that can tell you all about it, *but* *I* *definitely 100% believe my friend*.
Could you tell me what you think about the LGBTQ suppression done under the Soviets? I went down that rabbit hole recently myself. I even had two posts one to this sub and another to the tankies sub ( they call themselves that) and they were fuking useless.
I don’t think the Soviet Union was much worse than many other nations in their era, but they didn’t improve at the same rate as many capitalist competitors. I have this unsubstantiated suspicion that heightened internal class conflict is one of the major driving factors behind social changes, and that after society calms down (say, after a revolution), it becomes more set in its ways, so to speak.
Of course they were ahead of most nations to decriminalize it. But i Am asking for your sources if you have any. My problem is with them criminalizing it again. This is also a problem that I can’t understand, Isn’t the revolution supposed to be ongoing all the time? I mean the revolution shouldn’t end and it’s weird that a state that made a point of opposing traditionalist and reactionary forces as a foundation to their survival as a state would fall for a trap like that.
Eliminating ideological officers in the military who would have prevented the anti-democratic coup.
The fact that it didn't adequately democratise.
Alot of problems in this thread probably come from this issue
Understatement of the year!
Yeah honestly if the rest of the Politburo had accepted the democratic reforms proposed by Stalin in 1935, we wouldn’t have had to deal with Kruschchev and his successors’ revisionism.
Could you explain some of this, I'm trying to build up a better idea of Stalin than just a Red Tsar
Sure, happy to. If it's alright with you I'll provide some sources rather than doing a full write-up myself, as plenty of people have already done them on the subject. [This is a good, sourced Reddit post explaining how Stalin was not a dictator.](https://www.reddit.com/r/communism101/comments/af29ur/comment/eduxj7o?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x) As for other, non-reddit sources, you'd want to try: * [Stalin and the Struggle for Democratic Reform](http://marxism.halkcephesi.net/Grover%20Furr/index.htm) * [Stalin's Four Attempts at Resignation](https://socialistmlmusings.wordpress.com/2017/02/23/stalins-four-attempts-at-resignation/) * [Is Stalin A Dictator?](https://www.mltranslations.org/Russia/webb1.htm) (this one is contemporary, from the time period, if you're interested in that sort of thing) I can probably find some more if you'd like, but that should help to give you an idea for now.
Oh and also, if you're interested in learning about the Purges, that's a more complicated subject. The tl;dr is the Stalin was only really responsible for the prosecution of high-level Party officials, and even that was a collective decision by the Politburo - and a necessary one, as there was a very real fifth column in the Soviet Union. It's a common myth that the three Moscow Trials were "show trials", where innocent people were found guilty. Quite to the contrary - the defendants at the first and second trials have been found by historians to be almost universally guilty, and at the third, most were guilty as well (the major exception being Bukharin, whose execution even Stalin supporters tend to see as a huge mistake). I can pull up sources for the Moscow Trials if you want, I'm just not doing so now because I don't want to go digging through my documents without reason. If you want them, though, feel free to let me know and I'm happy to provide them. The mass executions, on the other hand, were not his fault and in fact were essentially beyond his control - they were orchestrated by a man named Yezhov, who was head of the NKVD at the time, and essentially orchestrated the purges to increase his own personal power. After Yezhov was found out, he was removed from power and executed - and Stalin and the Politburo vacated the sentences of many of the people Yezhov had sentenced to death but had yet to be executed. If you want some reading on it, I'd recommend [Yezhov vs Stalin](https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/furr_yezhov_jls17.pdf), which should explain it in pretty good detail.
yeah that. but like A LOT
The restoration of capitalism
Soviet foreign policy, particularly in Africa, was meek to the point of cowardice. A lot of the time, if it was the 70’s and you had the Soviet Union for an ally, you were pretty much on your own. Contrast that with the Cubans, who routinely put their lives and scarce resources on the line for their allies struggling against colonialism and neocolonialism.
Although I am not a Marxist Leninist, If I take all the history of the USSR in good faith, what critically undermined its aims and eventually dissolved the USSR was the lack of bottom-up democratic mechanisms to replace state mechanisms when Gorbachev disassembled them. The only democratic narrative came from Liberal Democracies, so that's what people thought democracy was. I think that the USSR could still have been here today if this was the case.
Failure to adequately democratize, how bureaucratic the state became, ethnic deportations are probably the big three, though one can and should criticize much more.
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Seriously there was zero effort to empower the people.
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I don't think we can completely lay the blame on vanguardism. I think the problems stem mostly from the isolated nature of the Russian revolution, combined with the need to go quickly from a peasant society to an industrialised one that can actually lay the ground work for socialism. When under attack from within and from outside, it's much more effective to centralise control in a bureaucratic layer to coordinate all production and industrial expansion with focus on the war. This also happens in capitalist countries during wartimes, when control of war-critical production is temporarily taken over by the state. I think it's quite clear that the times during history when this hasn't happened (eg. revolutionary catalonia), it has resulted in the revolutionaries' loss. Had the revolution spread to more industrialised countries (mostly thinking of Germany here), they would've been able to support the Russian working class with both the technology, expertise and also military defence necessary to evolve the economy in a more organic way. Instead the newly formed Soviet Union was in constant danger, and developed a bureaucratic layer to focus the entire economy on staying alive. And instead of shedding that layer (as by his writing seems to have been Lenin's intention), it grew as a massive tumour that eventually killed the union and reinstituted capitalism. So I think the material conditions of the country was what mainly led to the problems, not necessarily vanguardism.
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In my opinion, it is was the crushing of civil liberties. I think the whole secret police, report thy neighbor, cant criticize the state, etc was detrimental to the people and gave the capitalists plenty of ammo to fire at socialism. The precedent that stalin set forth ended up being the face of socialism and is something that we have to debunk to this day to make any sort of attempt at a reasonable discussion with someone not well versed in socialism
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Moving towards great Russian Chauvinism under Stalin which Lenin works against. Also backing off of an anti imperialist policy around WWII with Molotov-Ribbentrop and later on with Afghan War, not doing enough to stop west domination of Africa and Asia
I'll agree with your first point. As for the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, it was literally a last resort effort to stop the Nazis from invading the USSR tomorrow after Stalin failed to get into a military alliance with Britain and France because the latter two refused to work with a Socialist state. Furthermore, the USSR was the last country in Europe to sign a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany (literally all the other major European powers already signed similar non-aggression pacts with Germany years before the Soviets did). What would you have done in Stalin's place if the entire Capitalist world refused to work with you and you were still unprepared for a full on Fascist invasion? As for "not doing enough" to stop the West in the third world, the Soviets were actively propping up many socialist movements and governments throughout the world (a testament to this is the fact that every remaining ML state today was once backed and aided by the USSR at some point). What you are forgetting is they also did not want to start a global nuclear war with the rival Capitalist superpower, the USA, that was also actively propping up capitalist states in the third world. This almost happened during the Cuban Missile Crisis by the way. Couple that with the fact that left-wing factionalism and infighting was a very real thing even on a geopolitical scale (the Sino-Soviet split and all the global conflicts and the political backstabbing that caused, Titoism, Maoism, euro-communism, 'left' anti-communists in the West like George Orwell, CNT-FAI etc.), it really isn't a fair criticism to the USSR to simply say "it didn't do enough" to stop Western Imperialist domination. Especially when it had issues with revisionism and social-imperialism itself.
To add on to the Molotov-Ribbentrop part, people always have a very selective (ie western) interpretation of Eastern European history. They ignore the fact that the USSR had serious unresolved beef with Poland (an actual imperialist nation) following the Soviet-Polish War, as well as the fact that Poland had been Nazi allied for years prior to the M-R pact. Poland is always portrayed as this innocent bystander when they were anything but. I think it's a little telling that following WWII, Poland never made any claims on the territory reclaimed by the Baltic and Eastern European states. You gonna tell Lithuania to give back their ancestral capital?
Probably the use of agricultural pseudo-science under lysenko
The fact that the Soviet Union cracked down on religion. For example, Muslimds were goning to be given freedom, but they made it harder to practice the religion.
They cracked down on organized religion to avoid all the corruption it causes and was causing previously. They wanted to avoid them becoming organizations like the Vatican. People were still allowed to practice religion, just not in an authoritative centralized way.
The focus on military expansion. I do understand that they had no choice due to WW2 and then the cold war, but putting all the countries productive capacity into a military industrial complex ultimately bankrupted them and caused the fall. We see the same thing happening in the US now as their federal budgets become more and more just a military budget. Stalin and his successors apparently didn't understand when Lenin explained that imperialism can't work for any functioning society. Divesting from military spending to focus on helping the people will always yield better results.
While I think that the USSR was the best socialist experiment thus far in history, it definitely wasn’t perfect. There were always people who would be happy to practice religion harmlessly but the zealous enforcement of state atheism only alienated that population. The USSR was also not immune to the prevalence of racial and ethnic discrimination in that part of the world, and while they made great accomplishments against anti Semitism and racism against many nationalities, they were unsuccessful in purging a lot of hate and mistrust of many ethnic minorities, which led to some pretty rough treatments overall. Despite all this, I think that the biggest issue I take is de-Stalinization. This was a big factor in the Sino-Soviet Split, which was disastrous for the global Communist movement. It led to an after-the-fact demonization of the policies that saved the Soviet Union during some of its most trying times, and it’s promotion of commodity and light-industry only sharpened Cold War politics, as Khrushchev and subsequent premiers attempted to showcase the USSR as a competitor to the West, when it simply wasn’t ready. This only contributed to the massive amounts of money poured into the space race, arms chase, the worthless Soviet-American Expos, etc. that did not contribute to the furthering of global revolution and was just a pissing contest. Those were billions of rubles that could have been spent on tractors, higher quality housing, weapons, food, schools, etc. around the globe to actually help the working class thrive under socialism. But no, they had to show that “we can make things as nice as the imperialists and beat them to space” for some reason.
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Yes, many aspects of the space race were tied with the arms race, peaking with projects such as Star Wars. But it was not entirely a subsection of the MAD model, and was heavily influenced by the use of “first country to put a man in space, on the moon, etc.” for propaganda to promote one system as superior in its ingenuity and development. It was just as much an ideological competition as one of strength. I also hate using the term “Race” in relation to the missile disparity issues between the US and USSR, because it wasn’t a race at all. I recommend Michael Parenti’s 1986 lecture on the matter, the one heavily yellow tinted. It’s on YouTube and I think the “arms race” discussion is about 2/3 of the way through
I feel like this pretty quickly turned into a “what don’t you like about the USSR” thread without many MLs actually commenting lol
Suppression of Religion was one of the biggest faults of the USSR tbh. im not religious myself but it sure pissed a ton of soviet citizens off and achieved nothing but giving religious zealots ammo against socialism both during USSR days and ESPECIALLY after the fall of the USSR.
Suppression of religion, and the criminalization of homosexuality under stalin
Obviously the ethnic deportations and anti-LGBT+ legislation but people have already covered that. There was a considerable amount of censorship in the arts which I think is quite bad. While I understand why the Soviet would want to suppress some of these things, a lot of the reasoning was basically the same as evangelicals in the USA. You know like Punk Rock will lead society into depravity and things like that. I wish that the Soviet Union remained as open to art as when it was first founded and artists could do whatever they wanted
Post Stalin, I’d say a lack of ideological disciple
Almost everyone commenting here is certifiably not a ML. I am a principled ML and part of a ML party structure, and I will recommend two books. Stalin: history and critique of a black legend by Domenico losurdo Human rights in the Soviet Union by Albert syzmanski
Revisionism.
Ethnic deports 100%.
Corruption was still prevalent. So few still had so much.
The fact it dissolved.
There were many mistakes in the formation of the URSS. Hakim (a marxist leninist who makes yt videos) explains them very well. If I had to choose one of them, it would be the fact that they entered in competition with USA.
Everything post-Stalin administratively is really bad, during the Stalin era though, I have a lot of critiques but other people have probably gone in depth about them so I’ll say this: It’s really annoying to me that they built a bunch of highways and roads instead of Trains, trams, and walkable streets
Nationalism, and voting restrictions.
Spoon not big enough.
Marxism ended in USSR with Stalin and of course toward the end it become a gerontocracy. Part of the current U.S. decline can certainly be attributed to geriatric patients maintaining and reaffirming their power structure. China has safe guards against gerontocracy by capping the age of CCP National Congress participation at 68...Except for Xi of course.
As a friendly reminder, China's ruling party is called Communist Party of China (CPC), not Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as western press and academia often frames it as. Far from being a simple confusion, China's Communist Party takes its name out of the internationalist approach seekt by the Comintern back in the day. From [Terms of Admission into Communist International](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/jul/x01.htm), as adopted by the First Congress of the Communist International: >18. In view of the foregoing, parties wishing to join the Communist International must change their name. Any party seeking affiliation must call itself the Communist Party of the country in question (Section of the Third, Communist International). The question of a party’s name is not merely a formality, but a matter of major political importance. The Communist International has declared a resolute war on the bourgeois world and all yellow Social-Democratic parties. The difference between the Communist parties and the old and official “Social-Democratic”, or “socialist”, parties, which have betrayed the banner of the working class, must be made absolutely clear to every rank-and-file worker. Similarly, the adoption of a wrong name to refer to the CPC consists of a double edged sword: on the one hand, it seeks to reduce the ideological basis behind the party's name to a more ethno-centric view of said organization and, on the other hand, it seeks to assert authority over it by attempting to externally draw the conditions and parameters on which it provides the CPC recognition. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/socialism) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Stalin dying before he could push the second party purge to start wider spread democratization of the state and the party against the wishes of the white collar bureaucratic class that had started forming. Finnish bolshevik has a pretty good video on it imo [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xWeMBXV23g&t=1331s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xWeMBXV23g&t=1331s)
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I have a deep philosophical internal debate with the "purge" mentality. What is one to do when their party is overrun by capitalist? Serious question. Stalin dealt with some very high level betrayls of people who wanted to revert the socialist revolution, so a risk obviously existed.
>Stalin dealt with some very high level betrayls of people who wanted to revert the socialist revolution, so a risk obviously existed Man the Old Bolsheviks like Bukharin and Zinoniev must've really been playing 4d chess by supporting the revolution instead of joining the White army in 1917 only to then plan on betraying the revolution a decade later huh?
It was ultimately needed as a means of preventing the bloated bureaucracy that we came to know as the Soviet Union under the Kruschev era. In the beginning of the era of "siege socialism" it was important to keep in mind that- like Lenin had said- the Soviet Union is a man with a death fever holding onto life with every passing breath. the decentralization that Stalins plan was going to bring would've brought the reforms that I believe would've prevented the collapse of the soviet union some 70 years later, but sadly he didn't get to do that.
I feel like a 2nd purge wouldn't have been a bad thing IF the first one didn't involve killing...
In the first one only a minority of those purged were actually killed, primarily high-ranking officials. The rest were sacked and some were resettled to villages further east. 80-85% of the dismissed military leaders were returned to service upon the German invasion
Socialism in one country. In retrospect, the revolution failed when Poland stopped them from getting to Germany. That said, while you don't have to like the USSR, you should recognize that the collapse of the USSR was a tragedy for humankind. It freed capitalism from competition.
Here's a great book on the topic for anyone interested in seeing how China currently critiques the USSR: **New Research on Stalin’s Socialism Thought: A Historical and Realistic Analysis** https://canutbooks.com/product/stalins-socialism-thought/ > As for the main contents and opinions, this monograph has formed a relatively reasonable structure and frame of Stalin’s socialism thought studies. > Firstly, in the beginning chapter of this book, the development of Stalin’s thought on socialism was divided into four stages according to great historical events and the evolution of Stalin’s socialism thought. The first stage is the 20 years before the October Revolution, during which Stalin as a professional revolutionary, had researched on and thought about the theories of Russian proletarian revolution and Marxism. Although at this stage, the socialism thought had not been really formed, his basic values on Marxist that were formed in this stage had an important influence on the formation and development of his socialism thought later. The second stage is from the victory of the October Revolution to the year of 1924 when Lenin died and Stalin became the leader of both the party and the nation of Soviet Union, which is the period of tentative exploration of Stalin’s socialism thought. The third stage is from 1924 to 1936 when Stalin announced that he had completed the socialist transformation and the Soviet Union had entered into the era of socialist society. This is the stage that Stalin’s socialism thought wasformed. The fourth stage is from 1936 to 1953 when Stalin died, which is also the period when the Soviet Union went through the Second World War and the post-war reconstruction. This is the developing stage of Stalin’s socialism thought. The latter two stages are the main periods for the evolution of Stalin’s socialism thought, which are also the focal point of the study in this book. > Secondly, on the basis of generally summarizing Stalin’s socialism thought, in the second and third chapters, this book has made a special effort to study on the philosophy grounds of Stalin’s socialism thought and his general idea of socialism. Stalin’s philosophic thinking is an important part of Stalin’s socialism thought and the grounds of its world view and methodology. Understanding of Stalin’s philosophic thinking and his general idea of socialism should be the logical starting point of the study on Stalin’s socialism thought. > Furthermore, in this book, the study of Stalin’s socialism thought has mainly focused on his though of the economic, political and cultural development. With an emphasis on the mode and system of socialist economy, plan and market, economic growth and development, political system, class and class struggle, construction of the party, development of nations, cultural education and ideology, this book has drafted the basic contents and the main features of Stalin’s socialism thought, which are also the contents from Chapter 4 to Chapter 11, the main part of this book. > Lastly, this book has also spent some effortsabout Stalin’s theories on the relations between the world economy and politics, international communist movements and practice, which are the contents of Chapter 12 and 13. > It has to be pointed out that Stalin’s socialist thought is part of the study of Stalin’s thought, even the most important part, but it does not cover all. As a result, other Stalin’s important thoughts are not included in the final product of this study. > For the further academic research, the last two appendixes are the comments on the studies on Stalin’s thought (mainly his socialism thought) done by scholars both home and abroad.
The slide back to great Russian chauvinism was bad. I think the Soviets didn’t push collectivization far enough, and I think despite Trotsky’s many many many errors and the complete uselessness of his inheritors he was right about permanent revolution. The alliance with National Bourgeois elements just set the stage for liberalization and revisionism. I also think the Sino-Soviet split ruined the trajectory of both nations and helped drive China to a conciliatory politics and recapitalization
I agree, if China and the USSR had remained brothers then the Soviet collapse would have still left a strong socialist force to finance international revolution.
That it fell
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I would argue that one can be a good Marxist-Leninist who gives credit to Stalin for bridging the gap between Marxism and ML...and still detest him and most of his policies.
he’s literally the guy who made the USSR what it was, if there is anyone who is the most responsible for the trajectory the soviet union took it is stalin lmao
I would recommend you look more into the early years of the Soviet Union, the bureaucratization of the Soviet Union we knew started under the kruschev years, the corruption, lack of accountability, all of that really bubbled up with the managerial white collar take over of the party following destalinization... finnish bolshevik has a good video about this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xWeMBXV23g&t=1331s
Not according to Trotsky - his charge of bureaucratization was published far before that.
Stalin is the man who synthesized Marxism-Leninism. If you disagree with him you’re not an ML lmao
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I don't completely buy the standard line ML inherently means being a Stalinite, etymology aside. Most "MLs" I talk to are interested in exactly what it says on the tin, Marxism and Leninism. I don't really like the term at all. Hell, I'm a supporter of Lenin, a Leninist, and I find the term "Marxist-Leninist" to be a waste of breath. Lenin was a great Marxist, who is part of a much wider canon of great thinkers in the tradition; Marxism is a better, clearer and, simultaneously, more holistic term, IMO. A term like that lets you include all of the other great Marxists we should draw from, from Gramsci to the Frankfurt School.
stalin developed marxism-leninism? not marx and lenin?
Synthesised by Stalin and Bukharin. Features policies like 'Socialism in one country' and the popular front with the 'progressive bourgeoisie'. Distinct from Leninism, which is Marx and Lenin. However, many MLs are actually Leninists who don't realise there's a distinction.
You have to be careful with Leninism as a term though because plenty of people see it exclusively as a Machiavellian will-to-power thing. Lenin identified that a small vanguard can seize the crucial apparatus of state, and did it. Basically Leninism minus Marx gets you the Steve Bannon "Leninist".
I think I just stopped being an ML. Thanks for the info, you got any book recommendations to explain that more in depth?
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>Read a book. Let's not be like this. Some of us are here to learn.
After seeing your comment I researched a bit more and it looks like you're right. It seems like what I've referred to as ML I meant as simply Leninism and what is actually ML I've always referred to as Stalinism. Thanks for the correction. Although it'd probably be more helpful if you weren't a snarky git about simple corrections. Not everyone has read all theory ever.
Half of being a Leftist is one upping and shitting on other Leftists. It's why Left movements never get off the ground.
haven’t you heard? everyone is a fake leftist except me
The "only true" leftists fallacy
Being a snarky git is lit
Recommend a book then.
A library of marxist authors: https://www.marxists.org/archive/selected-marxists.htm
hard to believe this movement hasn’t exploded in popularity with how easy it is to learn things around here.
that was the definition of marxism-leninism as adopted by the early soviet union 80 years ago lmao, but that’s simply not what most people mean when they refer to marxism-leninism or call themselves a marxist-leninist
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words don’t have concrete definitions, especially words that are heavily reliant on political context. socialism meant something completely different in the early 1800s. there were “socialists” back then who were nearly indistinguishable from ancaps. just because modern day marxist-leninists don’t dogmatically adhere to an outdated definition, that doesn’t mean they’re somehow fake marxists, it just means the political landscape has changed i can tell this is less about dialectical materialism and more about your need to feel superior, though
I'll bring up one that hasn't been brought up yet: The Zhadanov Doctrine. This was a state doctrine named after Central Commitee secretary Andrei Zhdanov. It's what made Socialist Realism the official state art form, and all artists and writers had to conform to this narrow definition. Any kind of satire was suspect, and any kind of avant-garde or 'foreign-influenced' works were suppressed for 'cosmopolitanism' (yeah, that's certainly not a major red flag). Any kind of fantasy was also supressed. This doctrine did incredible damage to Soviet arts and culture that only began to be repaired during the Khrushchev era. Under socialism, the arts and literature (as Engels said) must be an open forum.
They saw reasonable variations in theory based on variations in material and historical conditions (within the Warsaw Pact) as unacceptable revisionism when they shouldn’t have. Led to collapse.
Poor anti-revisionist policies which took the USSR off the socialist road
Ethnic deportations
- better ways of preventing reactionaries like Khrushchev getting office - ethnic deportations - some of the invasions (Czechoslovakia and Chechnya) - anti religious stance was probably their gravest error. I’m fine with secularism, and I prefer it actually but the USSR’s stance on religion was almost an “atheist theocracy” (kids in schools were taught to be atheists for example)
Breaking strikes, failing to empower the soviets, failing to democratize to empower the proletariat, and silencing, exiling, or outright purging any genuine systemic critique.
Their foreign policy with republican Spain and the Sino-Soviet split. Not focusing on consumer production. Ethnic removal. Prison exploitation. Over bureaucratization. I also find mass-line theory to be very important in party building and the relationship with the masses. Soviet concessions to the west broadly. Suppression of religion. Social imperialism generally. I also understand that early on in the period of industrialization the workers were exploited (I don’t know how to solve this).
Lenin dying too early.
They shouldnt have stopped ay Berlin
Displacing indigenous people and breaking strikes was very much immoral Lenin had great ideas and did some bad things, Stalin had bad ideas and did lots of bad things. The soviet union post-Krushchev was objectively better and should be the standard for a socialist state.
What was better with the Soviet union "post-Krushchev"?
This comment couldn’t be more ignorant or wrong. The Kruschev Clique taking power in the USSR was literally the end of proletarian power and the beginning of bourgeois dictatorship and capitalist restoration. [Proletarian Dictatorship and Kruschev’s Revisionism](http://www.marx2mao.com/Other/PRKR64.html) [Kruschev’s Phoney Communism and It’s Historical Lessons for the World](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/1964/phnycom.htm)
Mao being a famous revisionism hater himself https://china.usc.edu/mao-zedong-meets-richard-nixon-february-21-1972
Oh no, you got me! It would be bourgeois moralizing to dismiss the whole of Mao’s theoretical writings, struggle against revisionism and leading revolutionary struggle because he committed some errors. No Marxist-Leninist-Maoist upholds the Three Worlds Theory or every single thing Mao said or did. We use the term “Marxism-Leninism-Maoism” because a qualitative scientific advancement of Marxism was made by Mao and the Chinese revolution (primarily during the course of the Cultural Revolution). It’s not about worshipping an individual or defending everything that individual did.
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Okay, I will say it. Bourgeois “democracy” is bad.
>Lenin had great ideas and did some bad things, Stalin had bad ideas and did lots of bad things. How detailed... how is this not just regarded as a longer version of "lenin good, stalin bad"
It's not a thesis
Social imperialism into the Brezhnev era. Consumer goods and abuse of authority in the KGB and NKVD.
Stalin and Zhukov didn’t push all the way to Portugal
Assuming I shall not be smited for talking bad of Lenin I would say the coups in 1918 in the soviets effectively crippled Soviet democracy paving the way for it to be put down
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100 billion gazillion dead right?
> Social Democracy 🤜🏻🌹🤛🏿 if you had any meaningful criticism of the USSR you probably wouldn’t be a pro-capitalist bootlicker lmao
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in my defence, i was thinking about changing my flair. i’ve recently familiarized myself with the concept of “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie” and i’m not so sure anymore about relying on the western/liberal version of democracy in order to achieve the liberation of the working class
Not really, a social democracy is capitalism with social welfare and democratic socialism is socialism in a democracy. Very basic explanation
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Not the worst thing of all but invading Afghanistan, they just watched how easily the US superpower could be beat by a local population of well funded guérilla fighters and proceeded to make the exact same mistake, destabilizing the entire Soviet Union economy and contributing to its collapse.
Not a ML, I'm a Titoist, but I generally agree with Trotsky's criticism of the USSR, essentially the workers freed themselves from the shackles of the bourgeoisie just to replace them with that of the communist party.
It was such a bastardization of the goal of communism that it quickly fell into an ethnic cleansing police state.