I believe in socialism, but I feel Stalin shouldn’t be idolised due to things like the Gulag.
I would like more people to become socialist, but I feel not condemning Stalin doesn’t help the cause.
I’ve tried to have a constructieve conversation about this, but I basically get angry comments calling me stupid for believing he did atrocious things.
That’s not how you win someone over.
I struggle to believe the Gulag etc. Never happened, and if it happened I firmly believe Stalin should be condemned.
For starters, “Gulag” just means “prison.” Of course prisons existed in the USSR, and some had rather brutal conditions. Others, however, did not, and treated prisoners better to much better than your average American prison. Nobody is saying the Gulags never existed, perhaps they mean your specific interpretation of the conditions of gulags and the extent to which they were used. Edit 1
As for Stalin himself, it’s fair to say he committed a fair degree of errors in judgement, had reactionary social views such as his view of homosexuality, was frequently paranoid, and so forth. At the same time, it is equally fair to understand that Stalin has been the subject of countless lies, exaggerations, myths, and other degrees of Cold War propaganda we learn as fact despite evidence to the contrary, especially following the opening of the Soviet Archives. Moreover, it is necessary to acknowledge the vital role he played in governing the worlds first Socialist State, and building the foundations of this rapid improvement on the utter squalor of the Tsarist regime.
Should Stalin be idolized? I don’t think so, as I believe that can get in the way of accurate analysis. Should Stalin be villianized and made a scapegoat to brush the Red Scare under the rug? I don’t believe so, either. The USSR came with countless benefits, from a doubling of life expectancy to free healthcare to near 100% literacy rates (better than the modern US), and more. These benefits were formed under Stalin, and as such we must do our absolute best to separate fact from fiction. If we accept and push purely the accepted bourgeois narrative regarding the real experience of AES states, then we cannot learn from them properly and sort out what worked and what did not.
Basically, Stalin was neither a perfect saint devoid of mistakes nor a unique monster that should be especially condemned. He was the leader of the USSR, but did not have absolute control, and in addition was in many ways less monstrous than contemporary leaders such as Hitler and Churchill. Correct contextualization is important. I highly recommend the short, 8 minute article “Tankies” by Roderic Day, hosted over on Red Sails. For more in-depth reading, Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend by Domenico Losurdo is a good historical critique of Stalin that focuses on taking a critical stance towards Stalin and contextualizes him.
Edit 1: seeing your other two comments, I am now entirely certain that this is the case.
As always, I have a book that I wish to quote from, but I cannot choose which parts, so I’ll just point to Russian Justice if anyone is interested.
For a shorter read see Chapter 14 in This Soviet World
Excellent work, comrade 🫡
Thanks, this is the kind of response I was looking for. I’ll look into what you said further.
With the image that Stalin has in the west, I think it alienates people when he’s not condemned. I can’t think of a singe leader that we should praise (Mandela maybe?) if anything we should praise ideas not people.
people need to be educated not coddled. conceding to and legitimising liberal/right wing revisionist history is a strategic error for any communist or communist movement.
If you don’t directly challenge false, bourgeois narratives, then they are used as ammo against related subjects. “Stalin was a butcher of 100 million,” if accepted, means the Soviet Union was a horrible failure as well. This means Socialism was a horrible failure in the Soviet Union. This cascading power of bourgeois narratives prevents real radicalization, and moreover allows repitition of failures if not properly analyzed.
Take another example. Stalin synthesized Marxism-Leninism. As a Marxist-Leninist, there is no avoiding Stalin when talking with liberals. Because of my belief that Marxism-Leninism is correct, I cannot avoid the topic of grappling with Stalin’s existence.
As Marx said, “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”
I think you hit the nail on the head with this comment. Stalin was a very influential man who shaped large part of the 20th century. Villanizing or idolizong his achievements without acknowledging the other side of the coin would be having an incorrect outlook on him.
I took a quick read of the link describing tankies. It more or less echoes what you said. That being said my observation of the use of the word tankie doesn’t fall in line with what the author was talking about. I’ve seen it used primarily for people who staunchly or blindly defend figures like Stalin and are incapable of acknowledging any criticisms of said figures. What yoyre describing is more of a lefty or a socialist in my opinion. The article was written in 2020 so maybe the use of the word has evolved over time. I haven’t been familiar with the word for that long to say otherwise.
Regarding the term “tankie,” I actually disagree with what you’re saying here. The term “tankie” is described to mean what you say, but the term is applied to people with the same analysis as myself, Roderic Day, and others who defend AES. I’ve even seen Anarchists labeled “tankie.” The reason the word “tankie” is used is because it allows the thrower to terminate the conversation and misrepresent the accused as having all of the blind, dogmatic sins the term itself has been associated with, regardless of the actual bearings of the conversation at play.
The quantity of people who actually fit the term “tankie” is miniscule compared to the quantity the word is thrown at with regularity.
That sounds to me like you were just dealing with bad faith actors, which isn’t uncommon here unfortunately.
I think we both agree on what it’s intended use is meant to be for. I guess you’ve just had the misfortune of dealing with people misusing the label to shut down any actual discussion.
What I am describing is by far the most common usage of the term I have seen, to the point that it might as well be the only usage. The intended usage of “tankie” has become weaponized discussion-avoidance and serves as a cheap copout to prevent tackling uncomfortable topics.
You are factually incorrect in the very first statement. “Gulag” means “главное управление исправительно-трудовых лагерей” and is a name of a state agency directly operating a network of concentration/forced labor camps. Each of the camps had their name, control and command structures and operated under direct oversight of some best Stalin’s chaps.
Also, it wasn’t just ‘prison’. Each of them was a concentration camp for politically it otherwise unsound elements, that provided Stalin with supply of free slave labor.
I’ll direct you to @RedWizard@hexbear.net in his comment here going over the Soviet prison system, along with myth-dispelling surrounding the Soviet prison labor system.
You didn’t need to direct me anywhere to accept that you made a clear factual mistake.
This comically evil understanding of the Soviet prison system is based off only a handful of unreliable sources.
Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror (published 1968) laid the groundwork for Soviet fearmongering, and was based largely off defector testimony.
Robert Conquest worked for the British Foreign Office’s Information Research Department (IRD), which was a secret Cold War propaganda department, created to publish anti-communist propaganda, including black propaganda; provide support and information to anti-communist politicians, academics, and writers; and to use weaponized information and disinformation and “fake news” to attack not only its original targets but also certain socialists and anti-colonial movements.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago (published 1973), one of the most famous texts on the subject, claims to be a work of non-fiction based on the author’s personal experiences in the Soviet prison system. However, Solzhenitsyn was merely an anti-Communist, Nazi-sympathizing, antisemite who wanted to slander the USSR by putting forward a collection of folktales as truth.
Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A history (published 2003) draws directly from The Gulag Archipelago and reiterates its message. Anne is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) and sits on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), two infamous pieces of the ideological apparatus of the ruling class in the United States, whose primary aim is to promote the interests of American Imperialism around the world.
However, in contrast to these depictions, we have this interesting report produced by the CIA regarding the nature of the gulags, or “Forced Labor Camps” as they describe them. Let’s take a second to note that this year, California voted to uphold their forced labor practices in the state, and that the US still maintains constitutionally protected forced labor as a form of punishment.
In terms of scale, Solzhenitsyn estimated that over 66 million people were victims of the Soviet Union’s forced labor camp system over the course of its existence from 1918 to 1956. With the collapse of the USSR and the opening of the Soviet archives, researchers can now access actual archival evidence to prove or disprove these claims. Predictably, it turned out the propaganda was just that.
This is 2 million out of a population of 168 million (roughly 1.2% of the population). For comparison, in the United States, “over 5.5 million adults — or 1 in 61 — are under some form of correctional control, whether incarcerated or under community supervision.” That’s 1.6%. So in both relative and absolute terms, the United States’ Prison Industrial Complex today is larger than the USSR’s Gulag system at its peak.
Regarding the “death rate”, In peace time, the mortality rate of the Gulag was around 3% to 5%. Even Conservative and anti-Communist historians have had to acknowledge this reality:
(Side note: Timothy Snyder is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations)
This is still very high for a prison mortality rate, representing the brutality of the camps. However, it also clearly indicates that they were not death camps.
Nor was it slave labor, exactly. In the camps, although labor was forced, it was not uncompensated. In fact, the prisoners were paid market wages (minus expenses).
We can comb over the details all you want, but I don’t think you care about the details. You are looking to reinforce your own personal bias, not correct it. You are not taking an objective and materialist view of history regarding the Stalin era of the USSR. Not even, at a minimum, drawing comparisons between the prisons in the Soviet Union and the current for-profit systems that exist today in America.
All this effort in this post will go on to be wasted, I feel. I do it, though because your post will attract others with similar questions, and hopefully those more willing to deprogram themselves will read it and do more investigating.
You’re not going to build a socialist movement if you build it off the back of Cold War era red scare propaganda. You came to us with a simple question, and to fully understand the answer, you need to read more and deprogram yourself.
The Gulag system was the Prison system of the USSR for much of its existence. No, it did not translate directly into “prison,” but that doesn’t change that it was the prison system, and moreover the conditions of many gulags were favorable compared to American prisons. It’s worth reading RedWizard’s comment because he dispelled a lot of the myths you perpetuate.
Removed by mod
Your comment consists of 0 facts, an ableist slur, and a recommendation to watch a work of fiction designed specifically to push an anticommunist narrative. Moreover, the assertion that I must not have read is silly, I linked an article and a full history book in my comment, and have a Marxist reading list linked on my profile with a mix of theory and historical texts. Why would anyone take what you have said seriously?
If you really want to understand communism, watch G.P.U. I guarantee that by the ending, you’ll revise every single thing with which your cultural Marxist masters indoctrinated you.
Never knew about that, I’m morbidly curious. Thanks for the post!
tl;dr there’s no response here it’s 100% reaction mugging