Joseph Stalin was a communist leader inspired by Leon Trotsky
Trotsky was a communist revolutionary and intellectual. He once wrote “In politics, obtaining power and maintaining power justifies anything” in his book “Leur morale et la nôtre”*
In this book, Trotsky justifies the use of lies, infiltration of other political parties, smearing, even hostage taking. He says absolute ruthlesness is necessary to overthrow a hostile system and wield power. He concludes "We are acting for the greater good. We can’t be restrained by normal morality".
Joseph Stalin took Trotsky’s advice literally. So he murdered Trotsky because he saw him as rival. Stalin also started killing people because he believed they could be sympathetic to capitalism or opponents to his power.
Matvei Bronstein: Theorical physicist. Pioneer of quantum gravity. Arrested, accused of fictional “terroristic” activity and shot in 1938
Lev Shubnikov: Experimental physicist. Accused on false charges. Executed
Adrian Piotrovsky: Russian dramaturge. Accused on false charges of treason. Executed.
Nikolai Bukharin: Leader of the Communist revolution. Member of the Politburo. Falsely accused of treason. Executed.
General Alexander Egorov: Marshal of the Soviet Union. Commander of the Red Army Southern Front. Member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Arrested, accused on false charges, executed.
General Mikhail Tukhachevsky: Supreme Marshal of the Soviet Union. Nicknamed the Red Napoleon. Arrested, accused on fake charges. Executed.
Grigory Zinoviev:: Communist intellectual. Chairman of the Communist International Movement. Member of the Soviet Politburo. Accused of treason and executed.
Even the secret police themselves were not safe:
Genrikh Yagoda : Right-hand of Joseph Stalin. Head of the NKD Secret Police. He spied on everyone and jailed thousands of innocents. Arrested and executed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genrikh_Yagoda
Nikolai Yezhov : Appointed head of the NKD Secret Police after the killing of Yagoda. Arrested on fake charges. Also executed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Yezhov
Everybody was absolutely terrified during this period. At least 500 000 people were murdered. Over 1 million people were deported to Gulags, secret prisons in Siberia, where they worked 12 hours a day.
Joseph Stalin decided to crush Ukraine for resisting communism and supporting independance. In 1933, he seized all Ukraine’s food. In the next months, 5 million Ukrainians were starved to death. The situation was so bad that thousands of Ukrainians turned to cannibalism. When Nazis invaded Ukraine, some Ukrainians thought they were saviors
https://cla.umn.edu/chgs/holocaust-genocide-education/resource-guides/holodomor
https://www.history.com/articles/ukrainian-famine-stalin
Hitler was a monster, but we really don’t talk enough about how bad Stalin was.
Fascist slop. Disregarded.
Exactly. Because nobody has ever died under Capitalism…
Vietnam war, 1.3 million. Korean war, 2.5 to 5 million. US Afghan war, over 240k. Iraq war, 600k to 1 million.
Or how about the 100,000 pregnancies impacted by thalidomide? The millions poisoned by the use of leaded gasoline? Or the deaths caused by forever chemicals, as companies knowingly poisoned people with Teflon waste?
Just scratching the surface here…
Are you saying the facts are wrong?
Everybody was terrified
Not really. Many thought the charges are real, and that Stalin led them to a great future with an iron fist, that’s all. The problem was, there really was no due process involved, so many of those thinking it won’t affect them were indeed affected. My great grandfather has made some enemies at work, so they reported him on false accusations. The “investigation” was brief, he was arrested, never to be seen again. This was a shock to the family, who never expected to get into this, being law-abiding citizens.
Stalin decided to crush Ukraine
Also known as Holodomor, this topic is highly contentious among historians. There is no definitive proof that this was intentional and not a massive failure on the side of early Soviet logistics, which was a mess at the time, plagued with dishonest reporting, high latency, and other systemic issues. Still, this did lead to a massive famine killing millions, so it’s not to be taken lightly.
Stalin is indeed a highly contentious figure, and a lot of what he did has led to grave consequences. But it makes sense to set the record straight. Besides, history should serve us as an advisor, and not as an ideological battlefield.
You’re right that there is no evidence that the “Holodomor” was a genocide, while there is plenty of evidence that the guy who coined the term had Nazi affiliations and was specifically looking to smear communism.
It’s still possible to blame Moscow for the famine. After all, they were in charge. But you also have to acknowledge that it was the last famine Ukraine experienced, in a long long history of cyclical famine. Meanwhile, under capitalism we still have famine in places in Africa because it’s not profitable to feed poor people.
The history of communism is a history full of mistakes with the occasional bad actor. However, compare that to the history of capitalism, which is a history full of bad actors occasionally making mistakes that let the good guys get a win.
Hitler was a monster, but we really don’t talk enough about how bad Stalin was
Not only is The Double Genocide Theory a form of soft Holocaust denial, it’s deeply comical to claim “we don’t talk enough about how bad Stalin was”. Yes we fucking do??? American popular code culture has been built on anti-Communism for decades!
Not really, the Soviets were considered Allies. In addition, the USA supplied weapons and materials to the Soviets and the fucks used them against Finland.
and the fucks used them against Finland.
but why?
In addition, the USA supplied weapons and materials to the Soviets and the fucks used them against Finland.
False. The war with Finland happened in 1939 and the lend-lease program didn’t begin until 1941. There wasn’t even a supply route connecting the USSR to the other allies until the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran, also in 1941 (which was one of the main reasons for the invasion).
True for the illegal Soviet aggression, but false for the Continuation War from June 1941 to Sep 1944. Assisting a communist country over a democratic one is disgusting. I would have let the Nazis and Bolsheviks murder each other until they were both severely weakened.
Well then, thank God you weren’t the one in power back then, or we would’ve lost the war. Hopefully, no one like you ever gets near the levers of power.
The Nazis and “Bolsheviks” did fight each other and become severely weakened because of it. 27 million Soviets gave their lives in the heroic struggle to save the world from the Nazis.
Btw:
When the Soviets attacked Finland, the Suomi pleaded for help from the UK and USA before turning to Germany. You gave them no choice.
What is wrong with watching the sick Bolsheviks and Nazis kill each other off from the sidelines? The world is better off without them.
The heroic Soviet struggle, which brutality occupied eastern Europe. Only an insane person would want to be influenced and occupied by the sick Russians again, which you support.
I suppose you also want the British to die, right? They invaded Iran, a neutral country, supported the Soviets in the Continuation War, and they inflicted multiple devastating famines on India, not to mention Ireland. Why don’t we just kill everybody, then?
Very briefly during the second world war, but beyond that period, both before and after, the Soviets were considered an enemy of the US and co.
American popular code culture has been built on anti-Communism for decades!
Great, doesn’t change the fact that the majority of the world is not America.
Being opposed to Stalin != being opposed to communism
that doesnt seem random, intellectuals and people that are likely to oppose will get killed first.
Truly a paragon. Transcending above racism, classism, or religion, he believed in and fought for equal opportunity murder.
All animals are equal, but some of them have guns
Joseph Stalin was a communist leader inspired by Leon Trotsky
Obvious factual error in the first sentence. Sigh. They don’t make nazis like they used to.
while overly simplified - the statement is technically correct - Trotsky was a big proponent of state terror campaigns and disproportional use of force to quell civil unrest. Stalin took this framework and developed it further into fully functional system. Trotsky also started the camp system that evolved into GULAG. He was also very dismissive about comrade Coba and this arrogance eventually did him in and led to his exile and later assassination.
Nah, a normal person would have said ‘inspired by Lenin’. OP is either dumb as rocks or AI.
The prison system in the soviet union was pretty similar to the system in place by the tsar - gather the problems up, send them to siberia. A new system that gestates in the womb of the old will have to struggle to shake these things, or whatever marx said.
but nah man, stalin invented prisons, go off
the tsarist prison system was nowhere near as elaborate and infrastructurally sophisticated as GULAG and it wasn’t integrated into the economy so the comparison is dubious at best.
Gulags were a practice that started under the tsar, deaths went down under soviet governance and eventually they ended it
Not arguing for or against the gulag point but this graph doesn’t prove anything apart from the fact that in 40s-50s there were medical advancements that reduced mortality rate of prisoners (duh) Proof that works here would be number of prisoners in gulag per capita for example (which would paint completely different picture btw)
I’m not sure how any westerner can complain about the prisons in the USSR with the state of the prison system in the US empire today. Spoiler alert, it’s worse in the US today.
can’t compare really - absolutely different frameworks
And now for those who haven’t seen it, or haven’t seen it for a while, go and watch The Death Of Stalin. Brilliant relatively truthful satire of the events preceding and after the event.
aside from compressed timeline - it actually does a good job representing the major players and their core traits and interactions. Lots of straightforward historical dramas about that period took a lot more artistic license in that regard. Like there’s an old movie called The Inner Circle which is basically about Stalin’s movie club - and it paints the same people in borderline caricature simplistic tones despite the movie technically being a serious drama.
Naturally timelines need to be compressed and multiple characters condensed into a single person for runtime and clarity reasons, but it still does a good job.
Now seems like a good time to give a shoutout to this video: History Buffs
If I remember it correctly, it was quite funny
It’s funny, because we weren’t there.
Not too long ago I started listening to the audiobook of The Gulag Archipelago, and I had to stop a few chapters in because it was negatively affecting my mental health.
You may have heard about the Soviet Union being bad in the 70s and 80s, but that was an absolute cakewalk compared to the Stalin era.
Oh yeah, this should be required reading for all teenagers. Does it destroy your psyche? Yes, and that’s why it’s important.
0 out of 10, would never read again. Glad I did though.
Gulag Archipelago is a fiction work, though. You want documented information on the Great Terror, you can go to legit works like the Memorial foundation, no need to read fiction written by a fascist
The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation is a three-volume nonfiction series . . .<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulag_Archipelago?wprov=sfti1
The Gulag Archipelago (Russian: Arkhipelag GULag; literally, “The Gulag Archipelago”) is a three-volume nonfictional literary investigation. . .<
You could go ahead quoting Wikipedia:
UCLA historian J. Arch Getty wrote of Solzhenitsyn’s methodology that “such documentation is methodologically unacceptable in other fields of history” and that "the work is of limited value to the serious student of the 1930s for it provides no important new information or original analytical framework. Gabor Rittersporn shared Getty’s criticism, saying that “he is inclined to give priority to vague reminiscences and hearsay … [and] inevitably [leads] towards selective bias”, adding that “one might dwell at length on the inaccuracies discernible in Solzhenitsyn’s work”. Vadim Rogovin writes of the eyewitness accounts that Solzhenitsyn had read, saying he “took plenty of license in outlining their contents and interpreting them”. Both Rogovin and Walter Laquer argue that the book belongs to the genre of ‘oral history’.
Assuming for the moment that all these criticisms are completely correct and valid, “Provides no new information” or “documentation is methodologically unacceptable” or “selective bias” or “took license” do not mean that a book should therefore be characterized as fictional.
Go ahead reading your Tsarist fascist as much as you want, you’ll just get called out when you try to cry crocodile tears while doing it.
Is this post satire?
“Stalin was a communist leader inspired by Leon Trotsky”??? The two were massive rivals with completely different ideologies.
I can hear the Hexbear slop community furiously masturbating at thought of ripping this post to shreds.
As they should, with factual errors this fucking baby-brained
LOL LOL of course a tankie came out for this one.
Damn, you sure showed them! Got any other galaxy brain zingers in there, Megamind?
Any actual notes?
I would argue Maximilien Robespierre did it before him
I can’t believe Trotsky convinced Robespierre to do the Reign of Terror
I never mentionned Trotsky
OP incorrectly said Trotsky influenced Stalin’s authoritarianism, so I was making a joke about that.
Bots spreading double genocide theory? Are we in a 2008 economic crisis again?
Meanwhile, the average victim of communism (considering soviets inflicted 7/10 nazi casualties):
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/historypresent.4.2.0115
All of recorded history is western imperialist propaganda.
Any proof of that
Clearly you’ve been brainwashed by capitalism.
If he’s on Lemmy he is more than likely not a capitalist. You’re more than likely a tankie though. The left can exist without authoritarianism dipshit.
it’s true that history is written by the victors but there’s still the point that (most) americans in 1960 could afford 1 house, 2 cars and 3 children.
Yet people still don’t know the difference that he was an authoritarian that forced a grinding, socialist state on his people over what actual socialism/communism is.
Humans aren’t ready for actual socialism. We have to evolve out the tribal savage first.
I’m curious how you define socialism, what you think humans aren’t ready for, and what alternative do we have and why
No you’re not. You just think you disagree with my opinion.
Socialism plays just fine with self-interest and greed, it just limits what you can do in its pursuit.
Communism - yes, relies on your own self-control and moderation in the face of abundance.
Could it be because “actual socialism/communism” has never existed in reality and every time it was attempted, it turned out to be a “grinding, socialist state”?
I think you could make the same argument with just about any economic policy. Free market capitalism has never existed in reality and every time it was attempted, it turned out to be an abstract of colonial imperialism.
It ends up billions of apes are hard to govern in a way that excludes usery and violence.
Humans are the problem. Any system we come up with will be corrupted eventually.
Hierarchy is the problem. Any social system that allows for it will be corrupted eventually.
I invite you to describe the framework for a society that functions without any form of hierarchy, then.
All of these frameworks would require every person to work for the betterment of society. It is a nice sentiment, but not really realistic. That is why they call it utopian.
I view the general problem with it is simply the existence of other societies.
IE lets say you have 4 societies on an island. 3 of them put all of their focus into developing a sustainable workable long term solution, farming/fishing etc…
1 of them, works on building weapons and attacking the other 3. Result, the murderous colony kills the other 3, then eventually either learns to act like the ones it killed and produce food, or it dies out with nothing left to raid.
Or like say rabbits, if you try and raise rabbits. You drop 2 in the wolf enclosure and see what happens. obviously the result is the rabbits die out. it’s not that rabbits aren’t a viable evolutionary path. It’s that without time and space to grow their numbers before getting encroached by the nearby predators, there’s no shot.
Point I’m making is… the biggest problem of developing any system, that works better on the whole. is outside interference. It’s the same concept that say modern manufacturing would make smaller and lighter cars better and far more cost efficient. They would be safer except for the fact that they wouldn’t survive a collision with an SUV. It’s not the smaller lighter car that’s the problem. It’s the established systems with their flaws are integrated into society.
I am more annoyed by people complaining about tankies that actual tankies at this point.
How tf was he inspired by Trotsky? He fucking had the guy killed!
