The economy of China is now growing more than any other country in the world, and it is headed by the Communist Party. It has balanced communism with capitalism and has become a leader at it. What many people dont know today is that Vladimir Lenin also tried to do that in Russia with his New Economic Policy (NEP), but Joseph Stalin put an end to it. Indeed, communist leaders in other parts of the world, such as Che Guevara favored China over the Soviet Union, whose Stalinist policy smeared communism. While the Stalin period is a continuity of the Lenin period in the sense that communism controlled the Soviet government, it was mainly a break because Stalin was more brutal and extreme in his policies than Lenin who was relatively more moderate.
The break stems from a difference in personalityLenin was a lawyer who was against the extremes of the Left and Right, while Stalin, prior to becoming all powerful in the Soviet Union, was a bank robber, kidnapper and counterfeiter. In 1892, Lenin earned his law degree from the University of St. Petersburg after initially being expelled from Kazan University where he participated in a student riot under the influence of Karl Marxs works. Stalin, on the other hand was originally an undergraduate theologian who eventually, like many clergymen today, exposed his dual personality. He rebelled and failed to graduate after being unable to pay his tuition fees and missing the final exam. Then he joined Lenins Bolsheviks after reading Lenins Marxist works. He funded the Bolsheviks through kidnapping, extortion and bank robberies. In fact, just after he resigned temporarily from the group because it banned robberies, he caused the death of 40 people after raiding a bank shipment. Later, it would be Stalin who would influence Lenin when it came to assertiveness in executions.
Thus, after Lenin suffered from a stroke, he feared the worst for Russia if Stalin, then General Secretary of the Communist Party, remained in power. He wrote a testament through his wife Nadezhda about how he wanted to change the soviet structure and the evils of Stalin. He rudely said that Stalin was too powerful and that he needed to be purged from his current post. Nadezhda faithfully mailed the testament to the Communist Partys central committee after Lenin died. It was intended to be read in May 1924 at the 13th Party Congress, but Stalin, along with Kamenev and Zinoviev who were members of the ruling troika, suppressed it. It was only in 1925, that the testament became known through the publication of Max Eastman in the United States. One of Stalins opponents, Leon Trotsky, who was assassinated later by Stalins secret agents, invoked it as part of his rhetoric against Stalin.
But Stalin remained in power and either reversed some of Lenins policies or made it brutal and extreme. Lenin, for example, created the NEP after realizing that a pure communist economy did not work. He allowed some capitalism, but limited it to small businesses. Large industrial ventures, international trade and banking were still state-controlled. Furthermore, in the agricultural sector, the state only took a portion of the farmers harvest as a tax in kind. The difference could then be sold to the market with a profit. While it increased yields in the beginning, eventually farmers started hoarding their farm produce to increase market prices.
This really upset Stalin and instead of finding a Middle-Way solution to the problem, as the Chinese communists did successfully, he hastily discontinued Lenins NEP after Lenin died, and he replaced it in 1928 with complete state control and collectivization. Stalin also feared future military attacks from aggressor nations like Germany, and he believed that rapid industrialization was necessary to protect itself from imperialists. He also thought that agricultural collectivization would enable Russia to achieve this. But the peasants, of course, vehemently protested against this policy, and as a result, many of them were executed. Moreover, the Soviet government estimated that as a result of collectivization, industrial output would increase three times and agricultural yields would increase 1.5 times, but these estimates or goals were not realized. And Stalin blamed the kulaks or wealthy peasants because of their non-cooperative attitude. The actual kulaks were only a small minority, but the ones labeled as kulaks, even if they were not, were exiled into remote regions, forced into labor camps, or they were simply executed. More than 20,000 people died as a result of Dekulakization in 1930. It is also estimated that about two to five million Ukrainian peasants died during the Holodomor famine, when Stalin tortured and executed these peasants to steal their grain, which could have fed millions for a year but instead was exported to fund the industrialization of Russia and to starve those who opposed him, an act of genocide, as the Ukrainian government asserts.
This was something Lenin would have definitely opposed he was vehemently against the imperialism of the capitalists, but Stalin became their equivalent. Lenin wrote Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) to explain how Western nations such as Britain and Germany exploit the natural and human resources of weaker countries to enrich themselves. Indeed, Britons conquered America, including Canada, and slaughtered millions of Native Americans, just like the Spaniards and Portuguese, stealing their land and importing slaves from Africa. The Britons did the same thing to the aboriginals of Australia and New Zealand. Not satisfied with their conquests, they also colonized and enslaved Asian countries like India, Malaysia and Singapore. The English poet Rudyard Kipling even wrote The White Mans Burden The United States and the Philippine Islands (1899), which was published in the once-popular McClures magazine, describing the American white mans role in taming Filipinos who he called new-caught, sullen peoples, half devil and half child. Eventually, the US government, inspired by this poem, attacked the Philippine Republic and captured its president, Emilio Aguinaldo, but the American generals wanted to annihilate half the population of the country since guerillas still hounded them. As they planned genocide, however, they were eventually confronted with formidable enemies in the form of Japan and Germany, something that allowed the Allies to see themselves on the mirror.
Lenin would never, indeed, want to associate himself with such imperialists, but not only did Stalin act like evil imperialists, he also joined them as Allies. Lenin thought that imperialist-capitalist Britons and French used Russia as a tool during World War I, and their capitalist interests dragged Russia into the conflict. In World War I, Lenin wanted to pull out Russian troops from the war since the Germans continued to march toward the east, but other Bolsheviks wanted to continue fighting. Trotsky tried to negotiate with the Germans but failed, so the Germans renewed their advance and captured some parts of western Russia. Consequently, Lenin withdrew from World War I through the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. Russia lost much of its territory, and Lenin transferred the seat of government to Moscow from Petrograd due to the German menace in 1918. But Stalin did the opposite during World War II. This time, when Hitler attacked Russia after breaking a non-aggression pact with them and repeating history, Stalin stood firm, unlike Lenin, in spite of the fact that millions of his Red-Army soldiers were already slaughtered by the Nazis, and he fought back. All the sacrifices that Russia made to industrialize and prepare for such a situation paid off. They stopped the German advance, recovered their stolen land and marched forward to Germany, where after negotiating and joining the American, British and French Allies, Stalin managed to fool them and capture East Germany, together with other Eastern European nations, as a buffer zone. Vengeance was Stalins.
However, Stalins resultant victory came at a very high price he executed all types of people from various races, ethnicities and classes, even his own party members, something that Lenin would object to since he believed the revolution was a war against class, not against race, ethnicity or gender. As Lenin said in a speech
Only the most ignorant and down-trodden people can believe the lies and slander that are spread about the Jews...It is not the Jews who are the enemies of the working people. The enemies of the workers are the capitalists of all countries. Among the Jews there are working people, and they form the majority. They are our brothers, who, like us, are oppressed by capital they are our comrades in the struggle for socialism. Among the Jews there are kulaks, exploiters, and capitalists, just as there are among the Russians, and among people of all nationsRich Jews, like rich Russians, and the rich in all countries, are in alliance to oppress, crush, rob, and disunite the workers...Shame on accursed Tsarism, which tortured and persecuted the Jews. Shame on those who foment hatred towards the Jews, who foment hatred towards other nations.
But Stalin allegedly hated Jews and many other ethnicities. While the historiography of accounting for all the executions during Stalins period has changed over the decades, there is no doubt that millions suffered as a result of his policies. He supposedly asserted that Every Jewish nationalist is the agent of the American intelligence service. Jewish nationalists think that their nation was saved by the United States. They think theyre indebted to the Americans. Among doctors, there are many Jewish nationalists. There are also allegations from those close to Stalin, including Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, that Stalin harbored negative sentiments about the Jews and that he was paranoid about their potential for espionage. But other historians think that Khrushchevs accounts are not accurate.
Even if Stalins anti-Semitism is hearsay, the execution and persecution of other ethnicities has substantial evidence. Americans, for example, who were trying to flee the Great Depression by settling in communist Russia, were sent to gulags, prison camps or were executed for potentially being spies. Stalins secret and public police, the NKVD, also arrested approximately 350,000 and executed roughly 250,000 foreigners, including people from Germany, Poland and Korea, since Stalin was paranoid about spies and rather than go through the difficulty of sorting out the real spies from innocent suspects, he took the easy path and just arrested all of them. Somewhat understandably though, after being attacked by Germany and Japan in the past, who wouldnt be paranoid about those countries and their neighbors After all, America did the same thing to the Japanese, who were all sent to prison camps, after Pearl Harbor was bombed. And even today, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI and even airport security uses racial profiling and often singles out Arabs, Muslims or anyone who looks like them as possible suspects even if they are innocent. The same thing is happening with innocent Iraqis and Afghans who have now turned to terror even if they were once indifferent since they were falsely accused and bombed, with their loved ones now dead. Thousands of these innocent victims also perished, so there is really not much of a difference between the policies of George Bush and Stalin.
Stalin also deported many ethnicities and resettled them in Central Asia and Siberia, much like the US Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) deporting Mexicans and other nationalities today. People from Finland, Korea, Ukraine, Poland, Germany, Greece, Lithuania, Estonia, Turkey, Bulgaria and Latvia were among those who were deported. Indeed, Lenin would have opposed such practices, as Khrushchev, who later reversed Stalins policies, believes.
Stalin was also paranoid about counter-revolutionaries within his own government and the Russian people, so he had them arrested and executed immediately during the Great Purge or the Great Terror to prevent any insurgency or coup detat. Indeed Leon Trotsky asserted that a river of blood separates the Lenin period from Stalins. Hundreds of thousands, the exact figure unknown, perished. Stalin also altered the historiography of the Soviet Union by censoring or altering Soviet textbooks and photographs. Those who were purged, for example, were removed from pictures, just as women today remove their ex-boyfriends from their favorite photos using Adobe Photoshop or similar computer graphics editors.
But in fairness to Stalin, some of his projects were continuities of Lenins dreams. During Stalins period, women were treated equally and were given equal opportunities. Advances in health care and education also contributed to improvements in literacy and the overall quality of life for the average Soviet. Stalin also pioneered prenatal care and hospital births for women. Foreign experts were also sent to Russia to improve the infrastructure and develop it.
In the end, while some aspects of the Stalin period were a continuity of the Lenin period, most of it was a break from Lenins anti-imperialist stance. While China is now more of the vision that Lenin saw, Stalin developed similarities with Western imperialists. Indeed, even until now, America and its allies are no better than Stalin.
The break stems from a difference in personalityLenin was a lawyer who was against the extremes of the Left and Right, while Stalin, prior to becoming all powerful in the Soviet Union, was a bank robber, kidnapper and counterfeiter. In 1892, Lenin earned his law degree from the University of St. Petersburg after initially being expelled from Kazan University where he participated in a student riot under the influence of Karl Marxs works. Stalin, on the other hand was originally an undergraduate theologian who eventually, like many clergymen today, exposed his dual personality. He rebelled and failed to graduate after being unable to pay his tuition fees and missing the final exam. Then he joined Lenins Bolsheviks after reading Lenins Marxist works. He funded the Bolsheviks through kidnapping, extortion and bank robberies. In fact, just after he resigned temporarily from the group because it banned robberies, he caused the death of 40 people after raiding a bank shipment. Later, it would be Stalin who would influence Lenin when it came to assertiveness in executions.
Thus, after Lenin suffered from a stroke, he feared the worst for Russia if Stalin, then General Secretary of the Communist Party, remained in power. He wrote a testament through his wife Nadezhda about how he wanted to change the soviet structure and the evils of Stalin. He rudely said that Stalin was too powerful and that he needed to be purged from his current post. Nadezhda faithfully mailed the testament to the Communist Partys central committee after Lenin died. It was intended to be read in May 1924 at the 13th Party Congress, but Stalin, along with Kamenev and Zinoviev who were members of the ruling troika, suppressed it. It was only in 1925, that the testament became known through the publication of Max Eastman in the United States. One of Stalins opponents, Leon Trotsky, who was assassinated later by Stalins secret agents, invoked it as part of his rhetoric against Stalin.
But Stalin remained in power and either reversed some of Lenins policies or made it brutal and extreme. Lenin, for example, created the NEP after realizing that a pure communist economy did not work. He allowed some capitalism, but limited it to small businesses. Large industrial ventures, international trade and banking were still state-controlled. Furthermore, in the agricultural sector, the state only took a portion of the farmers harvest as a tax in kind. The difference could then be sold to the market with a profit. While it increased yields in the beginning, eventually farmers started hoarding their farm produce to increase market prices.
This really upset Stalin and instead of finding a Middle-Way solution to the problem, as the Chinese communists did successfully, he hastily discontinued Lenins NEP after Lenin died, and he replaced it in 1928 with complete state control and collectivization. Stalin also feared future military attacks from aggressor nations like Germany, and he believed that rapid industrialization was necessary to protect itself from imperialists. He also thought that agricultural collectivization would enable Russia to achieve this. But the peasants, of course, vehemently protested against this policy, and as a result, many of them were executed. Moreover, the Soviet government estimated that as a result of collectivization, industrial output would increase three times and agricultural yields would increase 1.5 times, but these estimates or goals were not realized. And Stalin blamed the kulaks or wealthy peasants because of their non-cooperative attitude. The actual kulaks were only a small minority, but the ones labeled as kulaks, even if they were not, were exiled into remote regions, forced into labor camps, or they were simply executed. More than 20,000 people died as a result of Dekulakization in 1930. It is also estimated that about two to five million Ukrainian peasants died during the Holodomor famine, when Stalin tortured and executed these peasants to steal their grain, which could have fed millions for a year but instead was exported to fund the industrialization of Russia and to starve those who opposed him, an act of genocide, as the Ukrainian government asserts.
This was something Lenin would have definitely opposed he was vehemently against the imperialism of the capitalists, but Stalin became their equivalent. Lenin wrote Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) to explain how Western nations such as Britain and Germany exploit the natural and human resources of weaker countries to enrich themselves. Indeed, Britons conquered America, including Canada, and slaughtered millions of Native Americans, just like the Spaniards and Portuguese, stealing their land and importing slaves from Africa. The Britons did the same thing to the aboriginals of Australia and New Zealand. Not satisfied with their conquests, they also colonized and enslaved Asian countries like India, Malaysia and Singapore. The English poet Rudyard Kipling even wrote The White Mans Burden The United States and the Philippine Islands (1899), which was published in the once-popular McClures magazine, describing the American white mans role in taming Filipinos who he called new-caught, sullen peoples, half devil and half child. Eventually, the US government, inspired by this poem, attacked the Philippine Republic and captured its president, Emilio Aguinaldo, but the American generals wanted to annihilate half the population of the country since guerillas still hounded them. As they planned genocide, however, they were eventually confronted with formidable enemies in the form of Japan and Germany, something that allowed the Allies to see themselves on the mirror.
Lenin would never, indeed, want to associate himself with such imperialists, but not only did Stalin act like evil imperialists, he also joined them as Allies. Lenin thought that imperialist-capitalist Britons and French used Russia as a tool during World War I, and their capitalist interests dragged Russia into the conflict. In World War I, Lenin wanted to pull out Russian troops from the war since the Germans continued to march toward the east, but other Bolsheviks wanted to continue fighting. Trotsky tried to negotiate with the Germans but failed, so the Germans renewed their advance and captured some parts of western Russia. Consequently, Lenin withdrew from World War I through the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. Russia lost much of its territory, and Lenin transferred the seat of government to Moscow from Petrograd due to the German menace in 1918. But Stalin did the opposite during World War II. This time, when Hitler attacked Russia after breaking a non-aggression pact with them and repeating history, Stalin stood firm, unlike Lenin, in spite of the fact that millions of his Red-Army soldiers were already slaughtered by the Nazis, and he fought back. All the sacrifices that Russia made to industrialize and prepare for such a situation paid off. They stopped the German advance, recovered their stolen land and marched forward to Germany, where after negotiating and joining the American, British and French Allies, Stalin managed to fool them and capture East Germany, together with other Eastern European nations, as a buffer zone. Vengeance was Stalins.
However, Stalins resultant victory came at a very high price he executed all types of people from various races, ethnicities and classes, even his own party members, something that Lenin would object to since he believed the revolution was a war against class, not against race, ethnicity or gender. As Lenin said in a speech
Only the most ignorant and down-trodden people can believe the lies and slander that are spread about the Jews...It is not the Jews who are the enemies of the working people. The enemies of the workers are the capitalists of all countries. Among the Jews there are working people, and they form the majority. They are our brothers, who, like us, are oppressed by capital they are our comrades in the struggle for socialism. Among the Jews there are kulaks, exploiters, and capitalists, just as there are among the Russians, and among people of all nationsRich Jews, like rich Russians, and the rich in all countries, are in alliance to oppress, crush, rob, and disunite the workers...Shame on accursed Tsarism, which tortured and persecuted the Jews. Shame on those who foment hatred towards the Jews, who foment hatred towards other nations.
But Stalin allegedly hated Jews and many other ethnicities. While the historiography of accounting for all the executions during Stalins period has changed over the decades, there is no doubt that millions suffered as a result of his policies. He supposedly asserted that Every Jewish nationalist is the agent of the American intelligence service. Jewish nationalists think that their nation was saved by the United States. They think theyre indebted to the Americans. Among doctors, there are many Jewish nationalists. There are also allegations from those close to Stalin, including Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, that Stalin harbored negative sentiments about the Jews and that he was paranoid about their potential for espionage. But other historians think that Khrushchevs accounts are not accurate.
Even if Stalins anti-Semitism is hearsay, the execution and persecution of other ethnicities has substantial evidence. Americans, for example, who were trying to flee the Great Depression by settling in communist Russia, were sent to gulags, prison camps or were executed for potentially being spies. Stalins secret and public police, the NKVD, also arrested approximately 350,000 and executed roughly 250,000 foreigners, including people from Germany, Poland and Korea, since Stalin was paranoid about spies and rather than go through the difficulty of sorting out the real spies from innocent suspects, he took the easy path and just arrested all of them. Somewhat understandably though, after being attacked by Germany and Japan in the past, who wouldnt be paranoid about those countries and their neighbors After all, America did the same thing to the Japanese, who were all sent to prison camps, after Pearl Harbor was bombed. And even today, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI and even airport security uses racial profiling and often singles out Arabs, Muslims or anyone who looks like them as possible suspects even if they are innocent. The same thing is happening with innocent Iraqis and Afghans who have now turned to terror even if they were once indifferent since they were falsely accused and bombed, with their loved ones now dead. Thousands of these innocent victims also perished, so there is really not much of a difference between the policies of George Bush and Stalin.
Stalin also deported many ethnicities and resettled them in Central Asia and Siberia, much like the US Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) deporting Mexicans and other nationalities today. People from Finland, Korea, Ukraine, Poland, Germany, Greece, Lithuania, Estonia, Turkey, Bulgaria and Latvia were among those who were deported. Indeed, Lenin would have opposed such practices, as Khrushchev, who later reversed Stalins policies, believes.
Stalin was also paranoid about counter-revolutionaries within his own government and the Russian people, so he had them arrested and executed immediately during the Great Purge or the Great Terror to prevent any insurgency or coup detat. Indeed Leon Trotsky asserted that a river of blood separates the Lenin period from Stalins. Hundreds of thousands, the exact figure unknown, perished. Stalin also altered the historiography of the Soviet Union by censoring or altering Soviet textbooks and photographs. Those who were purged, for example, were removed from pictures, just as women today remove their ex-boyfriends from their favorite photos using Adobe Photoshop or similar computer graphics editors.
But in fairness to Stalin, some of his projects were continuities of Lenins dreams. During Stalins period, women were treated equally and were given equal opportunities. Advances in health care and education also contributed to improvements in literacy and the overall quality of life for the average Soviet. Stalin also pioneered prenatal care and hospital births for women. Foreign experts were also sent to Russia to improve the infrastructure and develop it.
In the end, while some aspects of the Stalin period were a continuity of the Lenin period, most of it was a break from Lenins anti-imperialist stance. While China is now more of the vision that Lenin saw, Stalin developed similarities with Western imperialists. Indeed, even until now, America and its allies are no better than Stalin.
No comments:
Post a Comment