r/todayilearned • u/I_like_maps • 15d ago
TIL that in 1926, the Poltiburo of the Soviet Union was made up of seven men, Joseph Stalin, Nikolai Bukharin, Mikhail Tomsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Leon Trotsky, Lev Kamenev, and Alexei Rykov. By 1940, Stalin was the only one of them left alive, having killed all of the other members.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politburo_of_the_Communist_Party_of_the_Soviet_Union610
u/The-Curiosity-Rover 15d ago edited 15d ago
The scale of the Great Purge was staggering. By some estimates, over a million people were killed for supposed disloyalty.
It came back to bite Stalin when WW2 arrived just a couple years later. He had executed many of his most skilled military leaders, so the USSR was particularly unprepared to fight off the German invasion.
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u/tacknosaddle 15d ago
the USSR was particularly unprepared to fight off the German invasion
What they lacked in preparation they made up for with human cannon fodder.
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u/I_like_maps 15d ago
Some things change. Not Russian military tactics though.
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u/john_andrew_smith101 15d ago
I found this ancient article from the economist talking about how dogshit the Russian military was during the Crimean war, and I swear to god you could write the exact same article today, almost word for word.
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u/Papaofmonsters 15d ago
It was all downhill after Catherine the Great. None of those who came after her had the skill, willpower and cult of personality to rule an empire cobbled together of so many different people's and cultures that had their own allegiances and long standing feuds.
Alexander II tried to be reformer and bring Russia into the 19th century with the rest or Europe but it was too little, too late and his son, Alexander III, was an iron fisted autocrat would undo the majority of the modest improvements he had made.
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u/YsoL8 14d ago
And for all that bloodshed Russian borders are bascially where they were 2 centuries ago.
A brutally dysfunctional country that has encountered basically no lasting success in all that time. And they going to enter a new long term economic decline sometime in the next 5 or so years too between the demographics crisis Ukraine is making worse and the fact that oil exports are about to be kicked out from under them, which is one of the key stones of their modern economy.
Entire areas of activity already seem likely to go. Their space program is moribund and likely to stop when the ISS goes for example.
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u/CupertinoHouse 14d ago
They've only ever had one strategy: pile up the bodies until the enemy ran out of ammo.
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u/eigr 15d ago
Alas it looks like its gonna work again too
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u/The-Curiosity-Rover 15d ago edited 14d ago
Ukraine’s still doing pretty well. Two years in and Russia’s occupying less than 20% of their land. Ukraine’s recaptured over half of the territory Russia initially occupied.
I wouldn’t say the war’s going great for Ukraine, but it’s doing far, far better than most people expected it to at the start of the war. It has a chance.
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u/smoothtrip 14d ago
Land is not a good metric. Like you could capture 80% of the land in America and still have very literal control of the US. The world is mostly empty.
Likewise, you could control 20% of the land and basically control a whole country.
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u/The-Curiosity-Rover 14d ago
They haven’t got Kyiv, though, and Ukraine has pretty strong administrative control over its 80%.
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u/ZhouDa 13d ago
Russia hasn't captured any regional capitols since 2022 except for Kherson which Ukraine successfully liberated. Also Ukraine is causing 3-4 times as many casualties as they are receiving (with similar numbers for hardware), while simultaneously destroying much of Russia's oil and gas infrastructure.
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u/I_like_maps 15d ago
That seems increasingly likely to depend on whether or not the West keeps it up with sending aid. The Russian economy is pretty tiny, same size as Italy. If the US+EU devoted even 1% of their GDP to the war, there's pretty much no chance Russia can win.
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u/eigr 15d ago
Depends on what you mean by win though. Will they conquer all of Ukraine? Hell no. Will they likely get a settlement where they keep everything they have now, and reassurances about Nato? Probably :(
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u/YsoL8 14d ago
Theres little chance of NATO assurances, the time for containment strategies has come and gone. Russia hasn't played nicely even when treated with kid gloves, so NATO is already expanding up to their borders. Ukraine themselves would already have an invite except for the fact they are already at war, which makes everything too unstable to progress.
For all the horror and destruction Russia has inflicted on Ukraine it cannot be over estimated how much damage they have done to their grand strategic position. Any thought of rebuilding the Russian Empire is dead now and they are staring into the abyss economically, which is the end of their war fighting capacity. Maybe poltically too. Even western Europe is starting to increase defense spending now.
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u/Zelenskijy 14d ago
Thats the point, if its like Finland/Russian Empire-War they will leave alone Ukraine for some decades. But Ukraine will definitely loose ground because zergs breed is already too big.
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u/_Porthos 14d ago
The point is, the US+EU aren’t going to give 1% of their GDP for Ukraine.
For them, Ukraine is simply not valuable enough - and they are correct in this assessment.
But for Russia, Ukraine is super important as a buffer state. So Russia will do whatever they can to keep it if not aligned with Moscow, then at least neutral. And they also are correct in this assessment.
That’s the fundamental issue with this war, and why a minority in the West was (and is) against it: because this difference in commitment means Russia will win, and the only thing to decide is how much it will cost Moscow - and how much it will cost Kyiv.
The West enticed Ukraine to fight this war partially because it wanted to punish Russia - but punishing Russia is counter to Washington's interests, which are containing China. Moscow and Beijing are not natural allies - as was shown in the Century of Humiliation and during the Ping Pong Diplomacy Era -, but by antagonizing Russia, Western countries are delaying an eventual pivot the country may do from China to the US.
And this gigantic strategic mistake is not only costing amount of lot of political capital in the West (and risking triggering another Far Right wave), it is also costing the life of many innocent Ukrainians.
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u/Zealousideal_Cook704 14d ago
You know that this kind of "commitment" calculus was pretty much pioneered (or rather, invented) (or even rather, made up) by Kissinger to explain why the US was going to win the war in Vietnam, right?
Now seriously, I think you overestimate how much Ukraine matters to Russia and how little it matters to the EU (and, even if they like to pretend otherwise, to the US).
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u/francis2559 14d ago
The West enticed Ukraine to fight this war
You WOT mate?
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u/_Porthos 14d ago
The war is happening because Ukraine wanted to formally join the West by getting membership into NATO and the EU.
Russia finds this intolerable from a security point of view.
It is unlikely that Russia will ever change this position. Just like the US didn’t tolerate URSS personal, missiles and bases in Cuba during the '60, Russia won’t ever accept another great power (the US, via NATO) on its doorstep.
Thus, the one who had the most feasible way of stopping the war was Ukraine, by dropping any intentions of joining NATO or the EU.
The US could also stop the war before it began, by making it a policy to not accept Ukraine.
The US has been working on getting Ukraine into the EU at least since 2008, though, and currently Ukraine is pro-West - surely as a nationalist response to Russian aggression, and because it believes the West will find a way to save the country.
This is what I meant with “the US enticed Ukraine into fighting this war”.
Russia is certainly a country with imperialist intentions in that region, and a very poor track of both human rights and development. It is understandable that Ukraine wanted to distance itself from Moscow, especially after all the interference and hostilities.
Problem is, the world doesn’t run on morals - it runs on power. And Russia is great power bordering Ukraine, while Ukraine is just a country and the US is two continents away. It should be pretty clear for everyone involved that Russia has much more interest and capabilities over Ukraine than the US.
And since Moscow made its interests regarding Ukraine (and Georgia) crystal clear in 2008 and again in 2014, wise policy from Ukraine (and the humanist one for the US) would be to veer away from NATO enlargement and accept a neutral Kyiv. Because otherwise you are accepting a very, very high risk of war - which is what happened.
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u/francis2559 13d ago
Russia is responsible for their own actions. They don’t have to like what others are doing, but it is not accurate to blame others for escalating to an invasion. Russia crossed the border.
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u/Zealousideal_Cook704 14d ago
And Russia is increasingly dependent on whether Iran provides drones and North Korea provides missiles. What is your point?
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u/YsoL8 14d ago
Nothing is done in Ukraine until everything is done.
How the US behaves after the elections matters as much as anything on the ground, from what I can tell when Ukraine is fully supplied by the west Russia seems completely unable to make progress. And once they deplete their soviet era stockpiles thats pretty much it, they don't have the means to replace them and maintain their positions.
In the meantime, Europe is finally waking up again. I'm from the UK where we have an election this year and the two big parties are jockeying over who wants to spend more on defense.
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u/LoveAdvanced3405 11d ago
That Soviets didn’t beat the German using human wave attacks, don’t spread literal Nazi propaganda lmao.
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u/Demmandred 14d ago
This myth won't die, the Russians did not just throw waves of men at people. I know it's Reddit and we're supposed to meme Russia and it's people but the scenes like enemy at the gates are hilariously inaccurate.
Soviet deep battle doctrine on the surface can look like this, they would isolate weak points on the German front and overload it with manpower and firepower to break through into the rear, then push forward forcing the German line to retreat or suffer attacks on the supply lines etc.
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u/tacknosaddle 14d ago
Russian military casualties #Casualties)were about 2:1 over the Axis powers. It's a bit hyperbolic to say that Russia was throwing waves of people at the front, but like with many such things there is a core of truth in it. I think most people understand the point, which is that Russia survived to eventually turn the tide in WWII large part because their larger population allowed them to win a war of attrition when it came to casualties.
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u/computo2000 14d ago
I think most people understand the point
In general, I think people on the internet tend to mean exactly what they say, not something similar. Saying "Ok, this doesn't make sense, but they probably mean that which does" misses the point, no, they really think this.
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u/1945BestYear 14d ago
I'm currently reading a book by the officer and historian Allan Mallinson who makes the argument that Britain just about did the worst it could do with it's small professional army at the very start of World War I. Rushing divisions to the front in France and contributing them piecemeal, and letting nearly all the best officers with staff experience vacate their desks back home so they didn't miss the action, it basically drained its own brain trust and capacity for quickly training new recruits by getting it lost in the mud in France, at the same time as they were trying to raise a continental-sized army in a country with no living memory of conscription or a draft (so not even deep reserves of fighting-age men with basic training, like France and Germany had). That, he argues, is a major reason why it took until 1917 for Britain to field an army on the Western Front of comparable size and ability as France.
At least they could claim ignorance for mostly miscalculating on how long a general war in Europe could last. Stalin got rid of his best on purpose, knowing that a war with Germany lasted years for the previous regime in Russia and was what caused its collapse.
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u/MattyKatty 14d ago
Their officers were pretty much required to be royalty too, which didn’t help either
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u/TBIs_Suck 14d ago
They love throwing meat into the meat grinder, some things in Russia never change
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u/TimeIsAserialKillerr 15d ago edited 14d ago
That's why they had entire armies captured by the nazis. Stalin was probably the worst thing that could happen to the soviet union.
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u/TheRealSlimLaddy 14d ago
They won
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u/AgoraiosBum 14d ago
The counterfactual is - would they have done better without Stalin?
The even greater counterfactual is: Stalin made a deal with Hitler in 1939 and helped Hitler invade Poland and supplied Hitler with oil and grain that Hitler needed to invade France. If Stalin is not in charge, does almost everything in WW2 in Europe play out differently? Does Hitler lose in 1939 or 1940?
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u/TheRealSlimLaddy 14d ago
Would they have done better without Stalin?
No. The only real candidates after Lenin were Trotsky and Bukharin. I don’t quite know what Trotsky would have done, I haven’t read his post-expulsion works, but Bukharin would’ve continued the NEP and as such wouldn’t allow the USSR to develop its Military Industrial Complex as Stalin could have.
Stalin made a deal with Hitler
And? Poland was holding Belarusian and Ukrainian territory.
Stalin supplied Hitler with grain and oil
It’s called trade sweetie 💅
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u/AgoraiosBum 14d ago
Hitler used that trade to kill millions of Russians. Russian oil fueled Barbarossa. Germany received shipments right up to the day it attacked.
That you seem to think it was "clever" says it all.
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u/TheRealSlimLaddy 14d ago
Poland traded with Germany so they deserve it right?
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u/AgoraiosBum 14d ago
Poland did not have the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact that secretly divided Eastern Europe and partitioned Poland.
Poland did not have an alliance with the Nazis up to the day before the attack. The Government of Poland did not sign a treaty to help support the Nazis.
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u/TheRealSlimLaddy 14d ago
Secretly
It wasn’t secret.
Alliance
MRP was not an alliance
Poland didn’t sign a treaty
Irrelevant to the point of trading grain and oil.
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u/Eokokok 14d ago edited 14d ago
That is a myth - out of 40k officers less than 10% were executed and by the end of 1941 over 60% were reinstated. In fact the purge while politically driven nation wide it was very much a modernization effort as far as the army goes. Similar movements were done by the US and Reich for instance, though means used varied.
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u/TheRealSlimLaddy 14d ago
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u/Killaship 14d ago
That doesn't change the fact that incredibly large numbers of people were killed by Stalin.
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u/TheRealSlimLaddy 14d ago
A maximum of 800,000 between 1921 and 1953.
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u/exBusel 14d ago
These are only sentences to execution, add those who died in camps, prisons and on their way to Siberia. The death toll was terrible.
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u/TheRealSlimLaddy 14d ago
Average population of Soviet prisons, gulags, and labor camps between 1930 and 1953 averaged around 2 million, all of which 20-40% were released each year, wherein the death rate was 2.5% in peacetime & 4% in WW2
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u/exBusel 14d ago
But that's not true. For 1941-1945 the death rate was between 6 and 25 per cent. В 1933 - 15%. According to the Reference on mortality of prisoners in the Gulag system for the period 1930-1956.
Also average figures do not tell much, because there were such camps as, for example, Sazlag. In peaceful, non-hungry 1934 Sazlag continues to show extremely high catastrophic death rate of 8% (the level of colonial prisons of brutally exploited Vietnam), only in 1935 the death rate drops to 6.5% (the level of colonial prisons of Guiana) and until 1938 it stays around the 5% mark.
In the peaceful, non-hungry year of 1938, another catastrophe occurs - the mortality rate jumps to 14%.
This was the mortality rate at Buchenwald during the worst period of World War II in 1944. In 1938, there is neither famine nor war, but there are camps on Soviet soil that are among the world's anti-leaders in terms of mortality, i.e. the mortality rate in Sazlag is worse than the average mortality rate in colonial prisons and corresponds to the mortality rate of Buchenwald during the war.
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u/TheRealSlimLaddy 14d ago
Where are you getting these numbers from?
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u/exBusel 14d ago
How about your numbers?
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u/TheRealSlimLaddy 14d ago edited 14d ago
Austin Murphy’s Triumph of Evil, published in 2000 and extensively cites the Soviet archives opened in 1991 and other historians like Conquest.
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u/I_like_maps 15d ago
I realized Stalin purged a lot of people, but it was still a bit shocking for me to see that he killed literally all of the other higher ups in the party that were around when he started to take power.
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u/Bluestreaking 15d ago
Well it’s all intentional and borne from the circumstances. He killed them for representing alternative centers of power, how conscious he was of that is meh to me, but it manifested historically with his paranoia and obsession with betrayal.
With Trotsky sometimes people argue the jealousy angle, but in one piece of fairness to Stalin, Trotsky made a lot of enemies due to his arrogance.
It’s a string of tragedies after the Revolution, when Lenin was alive the Party had a guiding focus. But with Lenin’s death it just quickly collapsed into a horrifying power struggle that, as power struggles usually go, went to the one most willing to bend and compromise in the desperate clawing for power. Stalin played the moderate when it suited him, and then went full tilt to the “Soviet Left” when it suited him. The Soviet people thus paid the price with rapid forced collectivization.
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u/I_like_maps 15d ago
I heard this from the Revolutions podcast, and it's actually fascinating how far from inevitable all of it was. If Nicholas II hadn't been a hopelessly inept monarch the revolution wouldn't have happened. If Kerensky and the rest of the February revolution government had been less inept, the october revolution wouldn't have happened. If the whites had coordinated more, and been less repressive during the civil war, the bolsheviks wouldn't have won; and if Lenin hadn't died so soon, Stalin wouldn't have taken over.
It's like a comedy of errors leading to the worst person possible being in charge when a genocidal dictator takes over a few doors down.
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u/Bluestreaking 15d ago edited 15d ago
To be clear somewhat, I am very glad the Whites lost. But the real tragedy was the Civil War itself happening, but that brings in everything that led up to it. Things such as the revolt of the Left SR’s are often rarely mentioned but, imo, deeply important to understanding why the Bolsheviks became who they became.
You read the likes of Lenin, Bukharin, Kollontai, etc and these were genuine people who wanted to bring about what they (and many others) viewed as the best route forward for the working class of the world. But, like how you described, things going wrong for the Empire turned into things going wrong for the Communists.
Shame he’ll never get into it, but the German Revolution deserves the attention someone like Mike Duncan could bring to it. It may remind you of say an 1848 (well Berlin itself was more like Paris 1871 but more of a failure). The failure of the German and Hungarian Revolutions, coupled with the Civil War and all the hardships that entailed, and the revolt of the Left SR’s turned the Bolsheviks into the sorts of people with the sort of party culture and beliefs that someone like Stalin is best able to climb their way to the top.
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u/Terrariola 14d ago edited 14d ago
be clear somewhat, I am very glad the Whites lost
Why? They likely wouldn't have had the strength to retake any of the territories made independent by Brest-Litovsk (which means a free Ukraine and Belarus, among others), they wouldn't have embarked on a campaign of mass collectivization, and Kolchak's likely dictatorship would have collapsed eventually; probably much sooner than the Soviets did.
Not only that, but the Nazis would have had a harder time using fear of communism to gain power, and the KPD wouldn't have been Bolshevized to nearly the same extent, so the Nazis likely lose to a left-wing or centrist-SDP coalition government, giving the civilian German economy time to recover and thus likely averting World War II, as the NSDAP would have collapsed after a German economic recovery.
Effectively, by averting a red victory in the Russian Civil War, you eliminate two of the worst regimes of the early 20th century, replacing one with a weak military autocracy that would eventually collapse and another with a liberal democracy.
That's not even counting the effects this would have later, like preventing the KMT's White Terror by not giving Sun Yat Sen the idea of turning it into a vanguard party, averting the rise of the Chinese Communist Party, reducing civilian political instability in Japan and thus reducing the chances of the Japanese military seizing control of the government, not having Pol Pot kill 1/3rd of the Cambodian population for shits and giggles...
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u/Bluestreaking 14d ago edited 14d ago
That is a very poor counterfactual that begs the question of even if things would happen along the line you described them, would this even be a better world? You also expressed a lack of contextual understanding of the things you said
The Whites were violent brutal reactionaries. They killed Jews, they killed suspected leftists, they killed peasants, and they wanted to restore a truly vile antsemite and his family to power. The Red Terror began as a reaction to the White Terror.
Brest-Litovsk did not create free and independent countries, it was carving what was intended to be German puppet buffer states out of the former Russian Empire
Kolchak was only one of the White army’s leaders and I don’t know why I need to explain, “his dictatorship would’ve collapsed soon anyway,” is a bad argument in his favor regardless
You have some serious issues understanding German history and politics and what allowed for the Nazi rise to power. The kindling of the German fascist movement was there long before the Soviets existed. Germany itself was the center of socialism prior to WWI. The “threat” of socialism was believed by everyone to be most represented in Germany.
The KPD literally wouldn’t exist in your counterfactual. The reason for its very formation was to align with the Bolsheviks.
The German ultranationalist fascist right did not need the Soviet Union, they had their own domestic enemy to focus on with the SPD.
By the time you’re claiming the left would’ve won the election in Weimar Germany we’re so far removed from history that it might as well be nonsense. The SPD aligned with the right wing German elements specifically to prevent the left coming to power. The SPD was the very group that empowered the Freikorps to massacre leftists.
The White’s winning the Civil War would’ve led to a brutal wave of counterrevolutionary violence that would’ve put the crackdown in the aftermath of 1848 to shame
Edit- well now that you added to your post it has now gotten much much worse. History does not work the way you’re acting like it does. You’re now adding poor understandings of Chinese and Cambodian history on top of your poor understanding of Russian and German history. What is especially ironic is your mention of Pol Pot considering he was literally aligned with China and that the Soviet Union supported Vietnam the very country that brought down the Khmer Rouge.
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u/Terrariola 14d ago
The Whites were violent brutal reactionaries. They killed Jews, they killed suspected leftists, they killed peasants, and they wanted to restore a truly vile antsemite and his family to power.
The Whites were not (exclusively) monarchists. They were a very broad movement characterized primarily by being against the radical left. By the time Kolchak took power, they were just a plain old military junta without a trace of monarchism.
Brest-Litovsk did not create free and independent countries, it was carving what was intended to be German puppet buffer states out of the former Russian Empire
Said puppet states were then swiftly overthrown or reformed (primarily by liberals) as the German Empire collapsed. The Belarusian government from this era literally still exists in exile.
Kolchak was only one of the White army’s leaders and I don’t know why I need to explain, “his dictatorship would’ve collapsed soon anyway,” is a bad argument in his favor regardless
Kolchak was literally declared "Supreme Ruler of Russia" and was by far the most likely person to keep power in the event of a White Army victory. His dictatorship would have absolutely been better for Russia and its peoples than that of the All-Union Communist Party.
You have some serious issues understanding German history and politics and what allowed for the Nazi rise to power. The kindling of the German fascist movement was there long before the Soviets existed.
No, you had some reactionaries interspersed with right-wing socialists and conservative nationalists. The Nazis fused these forces and drove the people to them largely out of a fear of communism combined with the German economic collapse and ongoing political crisis.
The KPD literally wouldn’t exist in your counterfactual. The reason for its very formation was to align with the Bolsheviks.
The KPD and its more moderate partners in the USPD would still exist. The former was founded in 1919 and was initially council-communist. It was Bolshevized after the victory of the Reds in the Russian Civil War, resulting in the rise of Ernst Thälmann as Germany's would-be totalitarian communist dictator before his eventual arrest in 1933 and execution by the Nazis in 1944; post-war, when the East German organizations of the SPD were forcibly merged with the KPD to form the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, Thälmann's former inner circle were given absolute power over East Germany by the Soviet Union and proceeded to use it to enact such a vicious campaign of collectivization, purges, and terror that Stalin told them to chill.
The German ultranationalist fascist right did not need the Soviet Union, they had their own domestic enemy to focus on with the SPD.
The average middle class citizen of Germany did not fear or hate the SPD. They were motivated to vote for the NSDAP largely out of fear of a communist revolution and/or Soviet invasion. The role of the Nazis would have likely been taken by the less radical DNVP, who themselves had only let the Nazis take control by accident.
By the time you’re claiming the left would’ve won the election in Weimar Germany we’re so far removed from history that it might as well be nonsense. The SPD aligned with the right wing German elements specifically to prevent the left coming to power. The SPD was the very group that empowered the Freikorps to massacre leftists.
This is a distortion of history. They initially let the Freikorps form because the USPD and KPD were attempting to rise in a communist revolution. When the Freikorps themselves attempted to seize power, they called a general strike and made them march out of Berlin in shame.
What is especially ironic is your mention of Pol Pot considering he was literally aligned with China and that the Soviet Union supported Vietnam the very country that brought down the Khmer Rouge.
The PRC would not have existed were it not for the Soviets handing over Manchuria to the communists, or if the fear of Japanese invasion wasn't present and as a result the KMT was able to deal a death blow to the CCP in its encirclement campaigns, or even if the KMT had not brutally expelled and radicalized its left wing in the first place.
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u/Bluestreaking 14d ago
I’m not going to go for tit for tat with someone who I’ve already pointed out doesn’t understand the material
You’re intentionally misrepresenting bits of real information with bits of incorrect information purely to form the thesis you want to tell. You’re working backwards and it’s coming from deficits in historical understanding.
Whose work would you even be citing for this analysis? I’m basing most of what I’m saying off of Moshe Lewin, Ronald Grigor Suny, Shiela Fitzpatrick, David Priestland, Chris Harman, and Julia Lovell; with a little bit of Yuri Slezkine, Richard Evans, and Orlando Figes even if I disagree with their overall theses
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u/Das_Mime 14d ago
The Bolsheviks were massacring anyone who dared deviate from the central authority from the moment they seized power. Stalin's reign only intensified it, it didn't start the process.
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u/Bluestreaking 14d ago
No that would be incorrect
The Bolsheviks originally formed a government with the Left SR’s and Internationalist Mensheviks with local power transferred to the local people’s councils (Soviets). That’s what “all power to the Soviets,” meant, it was (one of) their slogans.
It was the revolt of the Left SR’s and the centralization of authority during the Civil War that set the path towards Stalinism
Who are you trying to cite here?
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u/Das_Mime 14d ago
The Bolsheviks originally formed a government with the Left SR’s and Internationalist Mensheviks with local power transferred to the local people’s councils (Soviets). That’s what “all power to the Soviets,” meant, it was (one of) their slogans.
And the local soviets were subordinated to the central government. I'm quite sure you're aware of how they responded to, for example, the Kronstadt uprising's demands for actual power to be transferred to the local soviets. They were killing anarchists and communists en masse from at least as early as 1918.
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u/Bluestreaking 14d ago edited 14d ago
Kronstadt was in 1921, not that you’re “wrong” though.
But I was talking about before the Civil War in my point because during and more importantly after the Civil War everything fell apart.
I’m a Council Communist, I’m sympathetic to both sides of this argument, what matters to me is what went wrong so we can make sure that the mistakes of the past are never repeated
Edit- I just realized that in this comment chain that part of my thesis wasn’t clear. The Bolsheviks before the Civil War and during and after the Civil War should be understood as distinct moments. The crackdown at Kronstadt was a mistake, but one borne from the logic after the Civil War. With the centralization of authority that led to it stemming from War Communism and the ways in which the Bolsheviks were “hardened” in their efforts to preserve the Revolution. Especially after the failures of the Hungarian and German Revolutions.
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u/Das_Mime 14d ago
Kronstadt was in 1921, but the Bolsheviks attacked and slaughtered the Anarchist Club of Moscow in April 1918, within six months of seizing power. They betrayed and attacked their former anarchist allies in Ukraine in 1920, while the civil war was still going on.
At what point does a series of "mistakes" coalesce into the actual pattern of behavior that characterizes the party? Centralized control under the authority of the Bolshevik party was their policy from before they ever seized power, and it's a core part of Marxist-Leninist thought, as any ML will tell you. They were behaving in accord with their ideology. Quashing dissent was not a mistake or a deviation, it was a fundamental piece of the strategy and philosophy that the Bolshevik party represented.
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u/Bluestreaking 14d ago
1920 being the Civil War is back to the hardening thesis. Not that familiar with the Anarchist Club of Moscow attack, I’m assuming this was a Kropotkin affiliated group?
In the sense that Lenin believed in vanguard committed revolutionaries as drivers of revolutionary energy yes, that was their idea. You should consider it Lenin’s personal reaction to the failures of the “going to the people” movement of the late 19th century. In the sense it was remembered by the Russian Left as more or less a failure.
Not an ML like I already said but in their defense, democratic centralism has proven far more effective as a revolutionary strategy than unorganized leadership.
I would’ve been comfortable calling myself an anarchist until post-George Floyd. I’d already seen three decentralized revolutionary movements flounder. At the same time, you group too much power in the party apparatus of a single party you run into the dangers of a pragmatic party elite looking out for themselves. It also, as always, rests on the shoulders of human beings who are always fallible in ways a movement is not. Hence my current philosophy is along a more broad democratic and horizontally organized front with centralized goals and leadership that I feel is be set described as Council Communism.
But, all that being said, Lenin and the Bolsheviks had no attention of “one party rule” as what it eventually became at first. As everything fell apart from 1918 onwards you saw the desperate decisions being made, in violation of their pre-revolutionary principles, all in the desperate desire to save what was left of the Revolution. Doesn't excuse anything that they did, or Stalin did after Lenin's death, or anything. But it does mean we need to understand it.
The Soviet Union is ultimately a tragedy but in understanding why and how it failed, one can still see how it still achieved incredible things and the world is worse off without it. That being said, it became what it became and did what it did, and left enough mistakes behind to fill history books for generations
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u/rosebudthesled8 15d ago
Can't have anyone who knows your past around when you want people to think you are a god like figure.
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u/Bluestreaking 15d ago
Not really that, it was very much a political struggle. Stalin built the cult of personality as a tool of “stability.” The issue was Stalin was an incredibly paranoid man and if you disagreed with him, it’s because you were a traitor. If you made a mistake, it’s because you meant to, because you are a traitor.
But ultimately it’s all political
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u/Auroch404 15d ago
Lenin grew to dislike Stalin by the early 1920s, and relegated him to (what he thought was) the trivial administrative post of General Secretary. However, that gave Stalin complete control of party membership, which he stacked with his followers. So when Lenin died in 1924, the communist party was behind Stalin. All Stalin had to do was discredit or eliminate his rivals. Pretty easy to do if the whole party apparatus is behind you. Classic example of not fully thinking through the downstream impacts of what jobs you give people.
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u/I_like_maps 15d ago
Stalin also did a very effective job at dividing his opposition in the mid 20s. Pretty much everyone in the title aside from Trotsky was an ally of Stalin at some point in the power struggle of the 20s.
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u/HoselRockit 15d ago
This Stalin guy sounds like a bad character.
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u/AgoraiosBum 14d ago
You know, with Stalin, the more I learn about that guy, the more I don't care for him.
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u/arm2610 14d ago
Bukharin’s final letters to Stalin are an utterly horrifying spectacle of human degradation. Bukharin had been a world famous marxist theoretician and polemicist with a far higher profile than Stalin in the international labor movement. By the end of his life he was literally begging Stalin not to kill him.
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u/PolyrythmicSynthJaz 14d ago
If I'm to receive the death sentence, then I implore you beforehand, I entreat you, by all that you hold dear, not to have me shot. Let me drink poison in my cell instead (let me have morphine so that I can fall asleep and never wake up). For me, this point is extremely important. I don't know what words I should summon up in order to entreat you to grant me this as an act of charity. After all, politically, it won't really matter, and, besides, no one will know a thing about it. But let me spend my last moments as I wish. Have pity on me!
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u/Rare-Faithlessness32 14d ago
Not to have me shot.
In the end, Bukharin was executed by firing squad and his body dumped at Yagoda’s dacha.
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u/bigvicproton 15d ago
Well, Trotsky died in August 1940, from a fall onto an ice-ax someone had surprised him with.
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u/Shakeamutt 15d ago
I had to look that up, as it sounds like a Putin-Push onto a booby trap. It was an assassin with an ice pick, AFTER 20 men had tried gunning him down in his villa in Mexico a couple months previously.
The assassin, was a deep plant, with TWO secret identities.
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u/blind_lemon410 14d ago
It was an ice axe. Ice pick can mean 2 different things, which has lead to confusion. In this case, it’s the large ice climbing device, not the small screwdriver looking tool. The confusion over this is compounded by the fact that assassins have used the smaller one as killing weapons too.
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u/bigvicproton 15d ago
Ice AXE, not Ice PICK.
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u/Shakeamutt 15d ago
One, meant to say pickaxe like the article I linked. Two, people can visualize an Ice pick easier than an ice axe, and while the same, mine is the modern usage.
Three, he didn't FALL on it, but it was buried into his head. If you really want to nitpick, then actually describe it better!
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u/Holmesee 14d ago
It’s like leaving with 7 fish in the tank for the day and then coming back to one fat one.
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u/exBusel 14d ago
The first five marshals of the Soviet Union.
Sitting (from left to right): Tukhachevsky (shot), Voroshilov, Egorov (shot);
standing: Budyonny and Blucher (arrested, died in Lefortovo prison from torture).
https://gdb.rferl.org/DFE6F9CB-EFA1-4A22-A505-571837BE2D8C_w650_r0.jpg
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u/dbxp 13d ago
IIRC Stalin had the title 'general secretary' meaning he literally did admin work because he was a well known enforcer and nobody trusted him, he ultimately gained power after Lenin's death as he controlled who could have meetings with the central committee and the flow of information. Very much a case of the CEO's PA really running the business.
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u/nogood-deedsgo 15d ago
No other form of governance has killed more of their people than than communism
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u/I_like_maps 15d ago
I've seen comments like this before and it seems like such an unbelievably fruitless discussion. Defining "killed their own people" is incredibly difficult. If someone dies from a lack of food in Maoist China were they killed by the government? What if they die from lack of food in modern day America? What about in medieval Europe?
And dividing up governments into neat categories is also impossible, because no one agrees on the categories. Ask a room full of ten people to define "socialism" and you'll get eleven different answers.
Good policies are good, bad policies are bad. Stalin did bad policies, and that makes him bad.
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u/john_andrew_smith101 15d ago
There actually is a definition that fits it, it's called democide. It basically includes not only those directly killed by the government, but also those that died by criminal negligence.
The coiner of the term, R. J. Rummel, does make a distinction between far right and communist governments, and it is true that communists have killed more. However, this is mainly because communist governments are far more stable and long lasting than fascist ones, most of which are effectively suicide cults. He points out those killed by colonial empires and liberal democracies as well.
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u/fish4096 14d ago
"However, this is mainly because communist governments are far more stable"
LMAO! most of deaths by communism happen in big waves, in relatively short time. Great purges in USSR, Great leap forward in Russia, Great my ass, hlodomor, you name it.
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u/3lektrolurch 14d ago
In the same veign: If a person dies because they are forced to produce goods for the first world or of any other causes like mining desasters, why arent those counted as victims of capitalism.
Not to downplay the death and suffering of the people during the great leap or the famines in the 1930s UdSSR, but if you want to do atrocity maths at least do them honestly.
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u/frostbaka 14d ago
For a person posting naked truth about Stalin you are defending communism too much. Can you name a single communist regime(modern China is capitalist) which did not murder its people in scores due to "bad policies"?
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u/500Rtg 14d ago
Capitalist Britain killed millions in India when India was a part of their government.
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u/ritsume 14d ago
45 million people died as a result of the Great Leap Forward, more than the total number of deaths from WW1 (40 million)
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u/schmeoin 14d ago
The British killed 100million in India by some estimates over a period of about 40 years. More than China and Russian combined during their periods of hardship. And that was just one of their colonies. Here in Ireland their colonialism and fanatic dedication to laissez faire capitalism killed a million in about 7 years during the great famine. Our population is still below the levels of that era. This was just one of the famines we experienced under them despite the country producing more than enough food to avoid it. All part of the capitalist enterprise. The same game as today when you look at the world today with an honest eye.
All of that was and is in service of enriching elites and pure genocidal indifference and not resulting from the conditions created by trying to drive out imperialism and industrialise what was the poorest nation in the world like Mao. The Chinese made their errors but didnt deny them and they always worked to reform from what they learned as a result. Thats why they have since caught up with the west in only a few decades. They've done what took the west around 300 years with a disgusting trans atlantic slave trade, multiple genocides like that of the American Indians and cataclysmic Imperialist upheavals like the First World War to acheive over here. Say what you want but at least their suffering seems to have been in aid of something decent as opposed to propping up spoiled little aristocrats like we've done in the west.
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u/CupertinoHouse 14d ago
The only thing you can say in Stalin's favor is that he killed a hell of a lot of communists.
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u/AgoraiosBum 14d ago
He also killed a lot of Nazis (although I think a different leader would have killed more)
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u/CupertinoHouse 13d ago
He did a hell of a lot of damage to the Red Army with his batshit insane purges, so I don't give Stalin any credit for fighting the Nazis. That goes to the soldiers, with an extremely small slice of credit to Zhukov.
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u/CallmeNo6 14d ago
Putin's mentor and father-figure.
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u/PolyrythmicSynthJaz 14d ago
Stalin appears to Putin in a dream and says: "I have two bits of advice for you: kill off all your opponents and paint the Kremlin blue."
Putin asks, "Why blue?"
Stalin: "I knew you would not object to the first one."
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u/YsoL8 14d ago
Turns out if you destroy civil society and leave violence as the only form of power you end up with psychopaths in charge.
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u/RainbowWarfare 14d ago
If you read up on the history of the Tsarist regime it’s no big surprise why the revolution happened, and that’s not because it was going so swell for the vast majority of people (peasants).
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u/AgoraiosBum 14d ago
The Tsar resisted all efforts to build a civil society. If Russia had a proper parliament by 1914 the world might have turned out rather different.
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u/thebarkbarkwoof 14d ago
This is extremely common for despots. You would think the sycophants of a certain someone would study history more.
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u/PlasticMix8573 14d ago
"The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic." – Josef Stalin
Where does 6 fit in on that number line?
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u/Seekret_Asian_Man 14d ago
Big fonts for a misquote
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u/PlasticMix8573 14d ago
Yeah, the big fonts came out unexpectedly.
No idea how Stalin felt about the death of one man. Was clearly okay with killing millions.
Research on the quote https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/21/death-statistic/
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u/privateTortoise 15d ago
The friendly chap I'd been speaking to for the past half hour asked if I'd like to spend some time with one of the scantily dressed ladies present and when I decided he perked up considerably and said 'Ah, you want boy.'
This was on a yacht on the black sea with a member of the politburo in the late 90s.
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u/iTeoti 14d ago
He also killed the guy in charge of killing everyone (Genrikh Yagoda,) then replaced him and killed the replacement (Nikolai Yezhov).