max1461:
athingbynatureprodigal:
max1461:
txttletale:
the way that liberals talk about communist revolutions without acknowledging what came before them is so shockingly deceptive. there are many real criticisms of the USSR but the hegemonically accepted way of talking about it is like if you complained that the fire department came to your house and soaked all your possessions in high-pressure water and hacked down your door and literally never acknowledged that before they arrived your house was on fucking fire
I think this gives too much credit to the USSR, as many of their worst policies were just entirely unnecessary from the perspective of “putting out the fire”, but in broad strokes: yeah, endorsed.
“And then a psycho fascist took over, because the newborn communist state had none of the institutional safeguards that can keep murderous fascists from taking over, and thus was born what we know as the USSR” is probably the way to put that
like the “put out the fire” stage was brief, and very quickly got taken over by someone who liked setting fires and was big into murder
(This is why “Get rid of the Bad People who are in power” will never be the plan that creates utopia, because there are always more Bad People and if you think the solution is more killing then the Bad People have already hijacked your revolution)
Yeah, also agreed—I don’t think Stalin classifies as a fascist (after all, fascism means something particular, and is not just synonymous with “bad guy”), but he certainly seems to have been disinterested in the higher ideals of the early USSR. Maybe @vacuouslyfalse could comment in more depth on how this transition occurred. But the fundamental point is that the revolution of 1917 was reasonable, and at least in the broadest historical strokes, seems to have left Russian people better off than continued rule by the tsar would have. Of course, Stalin not taking power would have left them even better off than that, it hopefully goes without saying.
Sure, let’s talk about it. The early Bolsheviks are this fascinating mix of extreme cynicism and extreme idealism.
So worth noting first that there is no “revolution of 1917” - there is the February revolution, which put liberals and moderate socialists in power, and the October revolution, which put the communists in power.
The February revolution overthrew the tsar, mostly gutted his authoritarian state, and established a provisional government. There is a narrative among many anticommunists that this is the only revolution that needed to occur (the “true” revolution), but let’s talk about what the provisional government didn’t do:
-They did not end Russian involvement in WWI.
-They did not offer any promise of land reform, the principle demand of the Soviet peasantry, and indeed actively avoided it.
-They did not establish a democratic mechanism (unlike the soviets*, which were elected).
*If you aren’t familiar with soviet being used in this way, it’s the Russian word for council, and at this point in history it refers to a set of elected bodies emerging from Russian strike councils, which ran cities during general strikes starting in the 1905 revolution and eventually became the revolutionary mechanism that the Bolsheviks used to take power (“All power to the soviets!”). Also, shocker, it’s where the Soviet Union got its name.
-They did not have any broad base of support. The Bolsheviks had a narrow base of support (really just workers and radicalized soldiers), but when they took over, no one liked the provisional government enough to try and stop them.
The first point here is the key to the whole puzzle, imo. Of all factions right and left in 1917, the Bolsheviks were the only faction that supported ending Russian involvement in WWI. There were a small group of Menshevik internationalists, but they did not control their party.
It’s also worth noting that in the immediate aftermath of the October revolution, the Bolsheviks did not run a one-party state - they had taken power along with the left wing of the Socialist Revolutionary party, who were the peasant party of the time.
The Bolshevik platform at this point was simple and overwhelmingly popular: end Russian participation in WWI, all power to the soviets, and all land to the peasants. In truth, they could not have stopped land reform even if they had wanted to, but their adoption of the SR platform on land reform was surprising at the time.
Then, a lot of things happened pretty quickly:
The civil war started, with opponents ranging from disgruntled liberals to archreactionaries, all with the goal of ousting the Bolsheviks and left SRs from power.
The Bolsheviks began to set up a secret police and employ terror as a means of keeping control over areas. Both sides of the civil war (though the white side is like, 10 different sides stitched into one) routinely murdered random people they perceived to be their political enemies and expropriated the peasantry - neither had anything to pay the peasantry with for their grain, so they outright stole.
The left SRs had been useful as a check on Bolshevik power, and indeed, they’d been embedded in the secret police precisely to curb abuses of power.
The left SRs were morons, which is to say, in mid 1918 they decided the thing to do to save the revolution would be to try and force the Bolsheviks to re-enter WWI (????). This led into an attempted coup, which failed rather miserably and made the USSR into a one-party state once the left SRs were purged. Remember how the left SRs were supposed to be the check on the abuses of the secret police? Yeah, none of that. Fortunately, secret police orgs are notoriously trustworthy and capable of regulating themselves.
To say the peasantry supported the Bolsheviks during the civil war would be an exaggeration, but between the two sides that were murdering them and expropriating their grain, the Bolsheviks at least promised to support land reform - most of the white armies wanted to reverse those gains. This was one of many things that helped the Bolsheviks win the civil war.
Fast-forwarding - there was a huge famine as a direct result of the civil war, Lenin had a very smart plan for putting everything back together (the NEP) which made the peasants very happy, and the resulting Bolshevik state was the most radical in the world at the time, doing things like legalizing abortion, decriminalizing homosexuality, legalizing no-fault divorce, secularizing the state, etc.
These times still sucked, mostly because the entire country was poor as hell, but it was notably different from the times which preceded and succeeded it. The end of the NEP period tends to be marked as 1928 or 1929. Stalin won a series of internal party struggles for power, outmaneuvering his rivals and using his position as party secretary to secure a base of support, and by 1929 was firmly in control. If people are interested in how this happened I can write more about it, but this post is long as hell as it is.
The 1930s are complicated and tragic. Stalin was not insane or a fascist or completely uninterested in socialism - indeed, he pushed through an ultraleft platform previously advocated by Trotsky that collectivized the peasantry and rapidly industrialized the country - but he was ruthless, paranoid, dedicated to his own personal power, and utterly unconcerned with spending human life to accomplish his goals.
What liberals tend to miss is the USSR accomplished an economic miracle almost without parallel in the 1930s. What Stalinists miss is that many of his actions, especially in the purges from 1936 to 1938, inhibited this transformation (and were moral atrocities) instead of aiding it. In many ways, the USSR succeeded in spite of Stalin more than because of him.
Post-Stalin, the USSR would become less murderous, but it would never again be revolutionary - it would never again have the idealism along with the cynicism, or any illusion of widespread democratic participation from below. Stalin ripped that out root and branch - he annihilated the possibility (no matter how slim) that it would be something better.
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