“Had Mao died in 1956, his achievements would have been immortal. Had he died in 1966, he would still have been a great man but flawed. But he died in 1976. Alas, what can one say?”
I agree, think stuff like the Leningrad Affair was incredibly stupid on Stalin’s part. Like bruh you’re gonna die soon anyway maybe don’t purge thousands of your most popular cadres? Those guys would have been useful a few decades down the road.
Party should have thanked Stalin for his service throughout the 30s and 40s and then forcibly retired him post war in favor of Malenkov. Instead they let his brain melt which gave the Khrushchevites an opportunity to trash his entire legacy for a little temporary popular support, all while compromising the greater ideological project.
Hindsight is 20/20 and all though, and sticking with Stalin till death for stability’s sake probably looked like the best option at the time after the most destructive war in human history
After Stalin abandoned Lenin’s internationalism and started promoting the socialism in one country model, it was mostly downhill. Even though Stalin executed most of the Nazbol leadership, he appropriated the same sort of Russian nationalism to drive support for the Winter War in Finland, which was an absolute disaster.
The USSR’s ideological project of international socialism ended with Lenin. Stalin went full hog nationalist and the USSR’s socialist project never really recovered after Stalin’s purges. Stalin eliminated 75% of the Comintern.
Nikolay Bukharin who advocated for gradual changes in agricultural policies like collectivization would have been a much better leader imho. A trained economist who worked out models on decentralizing a command economy, he was one of the last purged by Stalin in the Great Purge.
I’d agree generally. One of the most difficult obstacles for global communists to overcome in the last century is that Stalin tied the project of building communism (globally) with the national interests of the USSR. A lot of communists obviously didn’t feel very comfortable with letting internationalism take a back seat to just always supporting Moscow and let the capitalists do the whole “reds are traitors who want to sell out their nation” propaganda a lot more effectively. The Sino-Soviet Split is another example of this, where Russian national interests won out over international solidarity.
Though about Bukharin, I can’t say for sure how things would have turned out if he and the Right Opposition came out on top in the power struggle. I really like Bukharin personality, he seems like a good guy, smart too. Things like collectivization would have been more “relaxed” under him than Stalin definitely, and he probably would have been able to just bribe the peasant kulaks into cooperating rather than going full class liquidation on them like Stalin. I bet Bukharin economy would have likely been really impressive if it was allowed time and space to develop since he seemed to understand in a Marxist sense that Russia didn’t get the benefit of prior capitalist accumulation and could do more to address that than just brute forcing the problem with massive, labor-intensive projects like Stalin did (with terrible health and safety regulations as well)
The major issue is that you still have the fuckin Nazi invasion happening in the 1940s, and without Stalin’s aggressive campaign of industrialization it’s possible a Bukharinist USSR just gets rolled over and genocided if that slower paced industrialization campaign means a weaker war economy. Things got pretty close a few times even with a hard ass like Stalin in charge. Plus to be fair in that global situation, stoking nationalism against foreign invaders does make sense even if it’s not strictly communist.
That’s one of the modern arguments modern Russians like to use to defend Stalin at least. They say “Bukharin would have dragged out collectivization until the 1950s, so we would have lost the Great Patriotic War and all died.” But whose to say WW2 even goes the same way with Bukharin running things. It’s possible Bukharin’s more “lenient” leadership could have convinced the west to actually negotiate collective security agreement against Nazi Germany in good faith. Then the Nazis could be stopped at Sudetenland if something like the Franco-Soviet Mutual Assistance Treaty was taken seriously.
historical possibilities of that period of time are really fascinating
Stalin near the end had gone through half-a-dozen strokes, and was taking medical advice from a veterinarian.
His suspicious nature went into full blown paranoia, and he pretty much lost it.
sources and when did this happen?
Read it in a book long ago.
Found an article with some of the keywords, but it is just the abstract. There are 10 sources for the paper though.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-1331.1999.tb00004.x
Omg literally me
based
I agree, think stuff like the Leningrad Affair was incredibly stupid on Stalin’s part. Like bruh you’re gonna die soon anyway maybe don’t purge thousands of your most popular cadres? Those guys would have been useful a few decades down the road.
Party should have thanked Stalin for his service throughout the 30s and 40s and then forcibly retired him post war in favor of Malenkov. Instead they let his brain melt which gave the Khrushchevites an opportunity to trash his entire legacy for a little temporary popular support, all while compromising the greater ideological project.
Hindsight is 20/20 and all though, and sticking with Stalin till death for stability’s sake probably looked like the best option at the time after the most destructive war in human history
After Stalin abandoned Lenin’s internationalism and started promoting the socialism in one country model, it was mostly downhill. Even though Stalin executed most of the Nazbol leadership, he appropriated the same sort of Russian nationalism to drive support for the Winter War in Finland, which was an absolute disaster.
The USSR’s ideological project of international socialism ended with Lenin. Stalin went full hog nationalist and the USSR’s socialist project never really recovered after Stalin’s purges. Stalin eliminated 75% of the Comintern.
Nikolay Bukharin who advocated for gradual changes in agricultural policies like collectivization would have been a much better leader imho. A trained economist who worked out models on decentralizing a command economy, he was one of the last purged by Stalin in the Great Purge.
I’d agree generally. One of the most difficult obstacles for global communists to overcome in the last century is that Stalin tied the project of building communism (globally) with the national interests of the USSR. A lot of communists obviously didn’t feel very comfortable with letting internationalism take a back seat to just always supporting Moscow and let the capitalists do the whole “reds are traitors who want to sell out their nation” propaganda a lot more effectively. The Sino-Soviet Split is another example of this, where Russian national interests won out over international solidarity.
Though about Bukharin, I can’t say for sure how things would have turned out if he and the Right Opposition came out on top in the power struggle. I really like Bukharin personality, he seems like a good guy, smart too. Things like collectivization would have been more “relaxed” under him than Stalin definitely, and he probably would have been able to just bribe the peasant kulaks into cooperating rather than going full class liquidation on them like Stalin. I bet Bukharin economy would have likely been really impressive if it was allowed time and space to develop since he seemed to understand in a Marxist sense that Russia didn’t get the benefit of prior capitalist accumulation and could do more to address that than just brute forcing the problem with massive, labor-intensive projects like Stalin did (with terrible health and safety regulations as well)
The major issue is that you still have the fuckin Nazi invasion happening in the 1940s, and without Stalin’s aggressive campaign of industrialization it’s possible a Bukharinist USSR just gets rolled over and genocided if that slower paced industrialization campaign means a weaker war economy. Things got pretty close a few times even with a hard ass like Stalin in charge. Plus to be fair in that global situation, stoking nationalism against foreign invaders does make sense even if it’s not strictly communist.
That’s one of the modern arguments modern Russians like to use to defend Stalin at least. They say “Bukharin would have dragged out collectivization until the 1950s, so we would have lost the Great Patriotic War and all died.” But whose to say WW2 even goes the same way with Bukharin running things. It’s possible Bukharin’s more “lenient” leadership could have convinced the west to actually negotiate collective security agreement against Nazi Germany in good faith. Then the Nazis could be stopped at Sudetenland if something like the Franco-Soviet Mutual Assistance Treaty was taken seriously.
historical possibilities of that period of time are really fascinating