Pretending Lenin didn’t like Stalin when he asked him to do an assisted-suicide instead of his own wife or anyone else is really quite insulting and always bothers me. He was the man he was absolutely the closest to.
They like to refer to Lenin’s testament to say he didn’t want Stalin to lead the party.
Stalin is too crude, and this defect which is entirely acceptable in our milieu and in relationships among us as communists, becomes unacceptable in the position of General Secretary. I therefore propose to comrades that they should devise a means of removing him from this job and should appoint to this job someone else who is distinguished from comrade Stalin in all other respects only by the single superior aspect that he should be more tolerant, more polite and more attentive towards comrades, less capricious, etc.
“Stalin’s only flaw as a leader is that he’s too mean, so the ideal person would be exactly the same as him but nicer” isn’t exactly a scathing judgement of Stalin, lol.
All this aside, the argument being framed this way in the first place is strange. Why do they place so much weight on the personal relationship between these two men?
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Yeah. I was being somewhat rhetorical with that question because I knew the answer amounted to “great man theory”, but you put it well.
All this aside, the argument being framed this way in the first place is strange. Why do they place so much weight on the personal relationship between these two men?
Besides Great Man shit and monarchist brain, I think a lot of the history of anti-“Stalinism” rhetoric, especially but not exclusively in “left” spaces in the west, can be traced back to Trotsky, who loved this shit, and then his acolytes, who arguably loved it even more, before filtering down to anti-Marxist “leftists” like Orwell, who can be very plainly seen to have absorbed Trotskyist historiography even if he was not himself a trot (see the characters of Goldstein and Snowball and how the evil bureaucrats hate them so much), and then saturating all western discourse about communism that isn’t just 20 trillion dead vuvuzela iphone.
That and people in our society are really strongly inclined toward black and white views of the world, so if they want to acknowledge that Lenin did a lot of great things then that requires making him not literally immaculate but highly sanitized and to have had his work corrupted by the Bolshevik Cain (I believe that’s the title Trotsky gave Stalin in at least one of his little essays, but some later trots made him more like the Devil of Communism who blasphemed against the Heavenly Father Lenin and murdered the Heavenly Father’s Son, Trotsky, and is now responsible for every ill related the Marxism). I still don’t really understand why this subset overgeneralizes like that, but I’ve had Trots explain to me that their ideology is literally defined against Stalin, and I agree with them, so perhaps it’s to try to have the greatest level of salience possible by making all the actual/nominal communists they hate from Mao to the late USSR be representatives of Stalinism (yes, I’ve seen both claims made emphatically). That’s just a guess, though.
Lenin’s so called testament was a fraud, Furr wrote a book about it.
And even if taken on a completely face value, it seem highly suspicious that dying Lenin suddenly awakened and produced a letters in which:
- Named a successor despite years of continous democratic practice and stern refusal to do so previously
- This sucessor was furthermore the person whom he criticized ruthlessly for over two decades previously and whom he didn’t trust at all
- He also bashed three of his most trusted colleagues
wasnt he completely stroked out and barely there when he supposedly wrote this?
Yeah
I don’t think Furr is a great source for it being fake, he almost always takes the maximalist on everything not reflecting poorly on Stalin, though I definitely agree that the “Testament” is not that big a deal and is misinterpreted by critics (including trots, whose messiah is partly responsible for its warped legacy).
No, he is great source, he just do appear as unreliable and lonely voice because he use Russian sources and not doing the painful sieving grains of truth from the western bog of propaganda like Parenti did (and Parenti still managed to produce controversial books). His problem is that global south marxists are not very interested in delving into history of USSR and even debunking old history in general, they have way to much going with current events, and what he uncovers is very uncomfortable for westolefto and prowestern liberals whose historiography is build upon anti USSR lies.
I definitely agree that the “Testament” is not that big a deal
In isolation yeah, but it is precisely upon a mountain of such “not big deals” that the anticommunism was build. Communists abandoning historiography to liberals was and still is a tragedy.
I certainly appreciate his research into the USSR archives and other Russian sources that get neglected, but I think his maximalism leads to making specious arguments in some cases. I think few people in the world know the archives better than him outside of the Russian government itself (and even then not that many more), but that doesn’t mean his inferences always make sense. Like, I don’t think we have good reason to think the Testament is fake, for example, and arguing about it is totally pointless when there are a dozen other things to say about the Testament itself and its handling if we want to address the bullshit narrative around it.
I think his maximalism leads to making specious arguments in some cases
Why is “maximalism” even bad by itself? Are you sure yo’re not reflexively bouncing into center?
Why is “maximalism” even bad by itself?
Because I think at least in some cases he is clearly reasoning backwards from his desired conclusion to whatever evidence he can make use of from his vast research, specious or not.
Are you sure yo’re not reflexively bouncing into center?
A fair enough question, aside from the fact that the “center” here is still supporting that Stalin did tremendous good for the world and that countless accusations made against him are ludicrously false and many others are overblown.
It is certainly true that I am very wary of absolutes (in the sense of something having entirely X quality and never the opposite quality), because I like deductive reasoning but it makes me acutely aware that things that are frequently presented as absolutes aren’t and deduction is constantly misapplied. I guess you could also word my criticism of Furr as that he seems to use motivated reasoning to defend a very absolutist view of Stalin. This doesn’t mean he doesn’t ever make good contributions, and very often the criticism he receives from liberal historians and other commenters is frivolous (I’ve read some of his responses and he often does a good job of refuting them), but at base I struggle to have confidence in him because of some of his sillier arguments.
Why do they place so much weight on the personal relationship between these two men?
It’s because they want to keep Lenin pure so they can continue to support and worship Lenin but not Stalin. If Lenin happens to have liked and approved of Stalin it becomes far harder for them to support him.
and this defect which is entirely acceptable in our milieu and in relationships among us as communists
anyone else feel seen?Why do they place so much weight on the personal relationship between these two men?
Because life a movie
Weird-ass leftist sectarians like that will never miss an opportunity to pick the most specific fight at any given time huh?
Being historically worse than useless is their only point of pride
That place looks deranged af. Free of ML? More like really badly obsessed with US slopaganda about it.
.au
Why are the gubbalibs like that?
RIP Tim
holy shit they are literally still making the same arguments as kautsky
“The world sure is pretty fucked up right now. It’s easy to look around and be confused about who the bad guys are. Just satisfy yourself that things are complicated, and that anyone who tries to contextualize current events is probably a utopian tanky.”
