Dear comrades,
As we all know there are two soviet eras pre and post death of Stalin. We all know Khrushchev basically did a coupe detat, by killing all Stalinists and also by starting the anti Stalin propaganda. We know he was the cause of the Soviet Sino split.
But what exactly caused the split? What policies did he push that were reformist or capitalist in nature ? How exactly did he fuck up? I know the results, but I lack in knowledge of the causes.
I think we need Khruschev's side of the story, tbh.
idk, I personally think he rather lost his right to that with all the lying in the Secret Speech, which was then cover for slaughtering Stalin's supporters in the political establishment, but you can do what you like, of course
Sure, but I don't think anyone really loses that "right."
That's a big statement. You really don't think anyone loses that?
Including conscious Right-wingers and Rightist-serving wreckers?
The collapse of the USSR and the ensuing tragedy (global tragedy btw) suggest otherwise.
It does the opposite.
Why do you think so?
So we can get the complete history lol
Imagine saying something akin to "let's hear Gorbachev's side of the story - we need the complete history" in 1993. There was an interview - it was bogus through and through. You won't get the complete history that way.
Why not hear Gorby's side of the story?
We did. It's just that he lied a lot
I'm not talking about that dumb interview, I mean memoirs, personal correspondence, people that were close to him, etc.
My friend tells me that there are also a lot of speeches of his with ideas that weren't even fully his own.
Sounds like an area of investigation!
I mean...
What you are suggesting is that we time travel and to get information that we don't have right now.
For obvious reasons we cannot time travel and do that. Obviously it would be nice to know how they rationalised their disastrous viewpoints. But we can't do that. Since they are dead and we cannot time travel.
So what are you getting at? Am I understanding you point correctly or what am I missing?
We do have the information though.
We have Khruschev's memoirs and speeches and supplementary theoretical texts lol
Hell, his works are literally cited in Kuusinen's work a lot.
No "time travel" required! Just old-fashioned historical research.
You raise a good point. If someone is interested, they can peer into Khruschev's side of the disaster themselves. The books are freely available here: https://annas-archive.org/search?q=Memoirs+of+Nikita+Khrushchev
Precisely!
Thank you!
Memoirs alone will not give you the full picture - rather, they will give you someone's viewpoint, however distorted it might be. One must inevitably compare that to other information.
Gorbachev, for instance, claimed in his memoirs that "Glasnost unleashed forces they could not control". That was at the very least very dishonest - he himself went to great lengths and encouraged criticism of the CPSU through the same media he handed over to Yakovlev and other anti-communist forces. What good would it do reading this part of his memoir if you don't have other sources of information to verify it against?
Okay, but Khruschev's not Gorby.
And you already give an example of insight that historical research and reading can provide.
Thanks for proving my point.
The point stands - memoirs alone are not a reliable source, his or Gorby's. Conceptually
The point doesn't stand because we don't know that due to the difference in character.
What is it that we don't know (due to the difference in character)? I am genuinely lost. What does that mean?
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I don't, please don't presume what I know. Please explain yourself, in good faith
You first.
No. I'm sorry, I'll just stop here. It would be better to finish this conversation, I don't like the way it is going.
I don't like the way it's going either.
Good day.
I'm gonna need a picture of Khrushchev's hog, for historical purposes.
Please post.
I've read most of your comments, and I get a really strange feeling from them. Almost like "I'm not going to bother reading Kruschev myself, but you all are WRONG because you've never read him".
As an ML community, we're committed to historical materialism (you can see an excellent overview of it from Marx here: https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/h/i.htm#historical-materialism). What I take from that is we have can have a deeper understanding of history than "mere" historians, who still typically lack any understanding of class or political economy.
And we especially don't need to read all the "Great Men" who "made things happen". We know that history is a process of class struggle, and understand its outcomes as such
And I would add that there's especially little value in studying the far right if our goal is to understand what they want.
Sartre put it best:
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