You guys know the real history, I'd be reading propaganda if I went on any other website
So tell me, real short, what triggered the collapse. Especially when it seemed to be doing well in the 80s.
Okay, you can get wordy if you really need to.
According to my dad: "They should have just let us watch rock stars play. We heard it on albums smuggled in, and they sounded like gods compared to our guys. Ofc we thought our system sucked and we should strive to be like them. Then, after the collapse, we found out it was all studio recordings and special instruments and shit, and when they played live it was around the same level as us. What a bitter disappointment - so they should have just let us have more freedom to experience it instead of forbidding it."
My mom, meanwhile, was getting worried about the neverending war in Afghanistan - my brother was born in '87 and she was like, fuck what if it continues on long enough that he gets conscripted in it???
Just telling you the mood of some people (maybe the majority of people) in the late 80s/early 90s. The ideological battle had been won pretty handily by the West lol. Both my parents had big moments of disillusionment in their 20s when they realised they would not build communism. For the record, my dad regrets the collapse of the USSR and my mom doesn't.
My mom, meanwhile, was getting worried about the neverending war in Afghanistan - my brother was born in '87 and she was like, fuck what if it continues on long enough that he gets conscripted in it???
Haha boy I sure am glad that's all in the past and nothing like that is happening now
Guess it's time for the Americans to collapse their system like my mom did hers. :)
ironically alfganistan always strikes back, 2 superpowers taken down by trying to square up. that would be wild if you look at it that way
(i know it’s indirectly its just kinda surreal)
God please tell me they immigrated to the US and their son ended up enlisting to pay for college.
We emigrated to Austria and my brother went to uni for cheap and I for free. :) Why the fuck would you want my family to have contributed to the horrors of the US war machine as a gotcha lmao
Just eager to see some sweet dramatic irony because the lives of anonymous internet posters are as real to me as a story in a movie. Actually glad things worked out for you and your fam irl.
The USSR did not collapse. It had a coup, with tanks. They attacked the russian white house, it was fucking awful . They rounded up the communists that might fight. Yeltsin was a counter revolutionary that couped it all, and despite the fact EVERYONE voted to keep the union they did not because the entire point was to destroy it.
Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Communist Party of the Soviet Union fall to pieces? An important reason is that in the ideological domain, competition is fierce! To completely repudiate the historical experience of the Soviet Union, to repudiate the history of the CPSU, to repudiate Lenin, to repudiate Stalin was to wreck chaos in Soviet ideology and engage in historical nihilism. It caused Party organizations at all levels to have barely any function whatsoever. It robbed the Party of its leadership of the military. In the end the CPSU—as great a Party as it was—scattered like a flock of frightened beasts! The Soviet Union—as great a country as it was—shattered into a dozen pieces. This is a lesson from the past!
went a little over the limit
I think he eats baby organs. that's what my friend Red D. It told me
but I'll check that out anyway
Almost every famous communist becomes more awesome the more you learn about them. I can’t believe I used to think Stalin was an evil dictator.
Every so often I think Xi might be a proper Communist after all. Purge the Austrian school fucks running the Economic schools and maybe treat Vietnam a bit better and we're cool Xi.
i think he is. if you search through some of his old career stuff, he loved looking through largely forgotten maoist rulebooks and throwing them at people who got in his way.
it's a travesty that chapo dot com has no comrade xi emoji. a fucking travesty
The USSR committed suicide. Gorbachev's reformist clique came to power and soon began to institute radical reforms aimed at liberalizing the political and economic system simultaneously while also engaging in superpower retreat from Cold War confrontation with NATO. Gorbachev and his people wielded the dissident press to attack resistance within the Communist Party; but the Party was not only Gorbachev's own source of power, it was the one (explicitly non-federal) centripetal institution that held the Union together. The fatal simultaneous political and economic destabilization, combined with the fatal undermining of the Party's legitimacy and monopoly pool n political power, allowed counter-revolutionaries such as Yeltsin to dissolve the Union through constitiutional means from the inside out. This was never an inevitable outcome but a highly unlikely and incredibly dangerous culmination of events, a willful suicide by a nations political elite.
Gorbachev's reforms crippled the Soviet economy, the CPSU, and the Communist parties of its member states, while empowering, enriching, and shielding reactionary elements in organized crime and what was basically the professional managerial class. This led to large scale strikes over worsening material conditions and a series of color revolutions and coups across the USSR, which the Soviet leadership was unwilling to suppress. Blame for the conditions that created Gorbachev and his bloc go back to Khrushchev's reforms and Brezhnev's inaction and stagnation, as well as further factors that are beyond the scope of this summary.
What exactly were these reforms that Gorbachev made? Why did he make them?
He did things like gut the central planning institutions and slash the amounts of goods and materials the state was purchasing from factories, leaving them to trade amongst themselves and sell to whomever and at whatever price they wanted, eliminated price controls and subsidies, began selling off state assets to "coops" that were often just criminal organizations involved in the black market/"second economy" that the Soviet authorities had been turning a blind eye to since Krushchev, appointed anticommunist radicals to control the state media institutions, and abandoned socialist countries in the periphery as a policy of appeasement to the US.
His reasoning is a bit harder to pin down: he came to power as part of a wave of reform aimed at modernizing and improving the USSR's socialist economy, and initially followed the reform plan laid out by his predecessor, to decent success. The problem was his own ideas, however well intentioned, tended to backfire horribly, and so he began leaning on more outspoken reformists for concrete plans who were ultimately revealed to be anticommunist liberals.
Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union goes into some more detail about what his reforms entailed, the conditions before and after them, the backgrounds of all the major figures, and the major events of the eighties. There are criticisms to be made of how much it places the blame on individuals rather than movements and material conditions, but it still has value as a reasonably thorough overview of what was going on in the USSR in the eighties.
He opened up the economy to global markets and created a new free press all at the same time in a shock therapy sort of way. Compare this to China who did the former in a very slow burn way, and never opened up their press.
china also never sold the land and the state still manages strategic sectors/resources and the whole financial system
also private companies of a certain size are obligated to have a party committee in their board (around 70% of total companies)
it's... a very different process lol
5 sentences...Cant do that as you're asking a lot but I'll be as brief as poss
Kruschev came to power in a military coup and repressed (either removed or killed) the loyal Marxist-Leninists after Stalin tried to implement a bill that would democratise Soviet society . In his last year in power he wrote Economic problems of the USSR attacking the revisionists
Enver Hoxha (leader of Communist Albania) said that that one of the Kruschevites told him they had Stalin killed (1)
Kruschev represented the nascent bourgeois but with Stalins popularity in the Ussr he could not implement his reforms. He does a secret speech that immediately gets leaked to the West (funny that) heaping all the problems in Soviet society on Stalin which was entirely falsified. The Secret speech itself was leaked in such a way to pour poison through the Communist party - it was disseminated to the top leaders and cadres of the millions of Communist Party members (something like 0.9% of the Party). Meaning it was not out in the open that could be honestly fought and corrected. If that speech had been public the revisionists would've swung from lampposts
He let out numerous counter revolutionaries from prisons and "rehabilitated" those shot during the Moscow trials like Tukhachevsky who we know now were guilty beyond doubt.
With Stalin denigrated he was free to implement the reforms (post Stalin Soviet textbooks would legit have stuff like "profit is needed and the central planning system is a Stalinist hold over. Kruschev even declared the primacy of profit in industry in1961) starting with the privatisation of the tractor stations where the farmers basically collectively owned their means of production and by 1965 the Kosygin reforms were implemented which
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reinstated the profit motive and the market
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attacked the central planning system and directive system
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allowed for the firing and hiring of people
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gave more power to the managerial class (who previously could basically be fired by the workers and the manager couldnt fire them)
It is this restoration of capital forces in Soviet society that led to a hypernormalisation within Soviet society (ie. They're told "we're building socialism" as socialism is being destroyed) until eventually they reached a point where they just pulled down the red flag, sold state industries to pennies to the nascent oligarchs and mafia in waiting and gave up the entire thing altogether
Despite this many people fought to keep Soviet socialism alive and Yeltsin could only come to power by shelling the parliament with tanks, supported by the West and massacring 3000 Communists in the streets. To this the Western press praised Yeltsin who is now uni formally described as the worst Russian ruler in history in Russia.
Yeltsin never would've won an election were it not for the West who proudly boasted about it
For the other non-shitlib on this site that is capable of reading more than 5 sentences I would recommend reading
The Complete Collapse Of Revisionism by Harpal Brar
RESTORATION of CAPITALISM in the USSR by Martin Nicholaus
THE RESTORATION OF CAPITALISM IN THE SOVIET UNION. by Bill Bland
References
(1) “All this villainy emerged soon after the death, or to be more precise after the murder, of Stalin. I say after the murder of Stalin, because Mikoyan himself told me . . . that they, together with Khrushchev and their associates, had decided . . . to make an attempt on Stalin’s life”. (E. Hoxha, With Stalin: Memoirs, p. 31).
Stalin tried to implement a bill that would democratise Soviet society
Can you give some more info/sources on this?
I'm actually updating the sources at the mo though the article i linked regarding democratic reform is quite long - the specific bit regarding the democratic reform is the below
According to historian Aleksandr Pyzhikov (who is very much an anti-communist and anti-Stalin historian) in 1947 there was a proposition to update the party’s program. This 1947 party program has never been made available.
“According to Pyzhikov this program described “a progressive narrowing of the political functions of the state, and to the conversion of the state into, in the main, an organ of the management of the economic life of society.” [It was clearly a plan for transitioning from Socialism to Communism as described by Marx and Engels.]
Pyzhikov explains that the draft “concerned the development of the democratization of the Soviet order. This plan recognized as essential a universal process of drawing workers into the running of the state, into daily active state and social activity on the basis of a steady development of the cultural level of the masses and a maximal simplification of the functions of state management. It proposed in practice to proceed to the unification of productive work with participation in the management of state affairs, with the transition to the successive carrying out of the functions of management by all working people. It also expatiated upon the idea of the introduction of direct legislative activity by the people, for which the following were considered essential:
a) to implement universal voting and decision-making on the majority of the most important questions of governmental life in both the social and economic spheres, as well as in questions of living conditions and cultural development;
b) to widely develop legislative initiative from below, by means of granting to social organizations the rights to submit to the Supreme Soviet proposals for new legislation;
c) to confirm the right of citizens and social organizations to directly submit proposals to the Supreme Soviet on the most important questions of international and internal policy.””
(Pyzhikov, A. “N.A. Voznesenskii o perspektivakh poselvoennogo obnovleniia obshchestva.” in Furr, Stalin and the Struggle for Democratic Reform)
https://mltheory.wordpress.com/2019/05/07/the-khrushchev-coup-death-of-stalin-khrushchevs-rise-to-power/
Funny how the things you describe is how China decided to operate. Quite hilarious seeing Stalinists in other posts doing the mental contortions trying to reconcile their adherence to a strictly planned economy with their adulation for Dengist China. At least previous Stalinists were internally consistent and pivoted to Hoxhaism.
the nascent bourgeois
Hm... I wonder who came before Khrushev who let them become nascent. His name escapes me, maybe you can help?
those shot during the Moscow trials like Tukhachevsky who we know now were guilty beyond doubt
A later Soviet investigative commission found that almost none of those people were guilty and their "confessions" were extracted under torture. Funnily enough the Tribunal sentencing Tuchachevsky and Yakir (two of the most decorated and forward thinking red military leaders) was itself purged (save for 3 members, among them an absolute military retrograde Budyonniy). So who should we believe then if it's seemingly traitors all the way down? Hell maybe Stalin was a traitor and secret Nazi collaborator himself, the NKVD just didn't get to him in time? See the absurdity of this hyper-paranoid conspiratorial thinking. The only thing beyond doubt here is that Stalin wrecked the military, stripped the party of it's most dedicated members (starting with cowardly killing Frunze via forced surgery) and fostered an atmosphere of constant suspicion and sycophancy towards careerist bureaucrats. Saying he had dreams of democratising Soviet society in the last year before his death just doesn't cut it and is quite rich when he had presided over this same society for close to 30 years and somehow never bothered to do this before.
Funny how the things you describe is how China decided to operate. Quite hilarious seeing Stalinists in other posts doing the mental contortions trying to reconcile their adherence to a strictly planned economy with their adulation for Dengist China. At least previous Stalinists were internally consistent and pivoted to Hoxhaism.
I largely describe myself as a Hoxhaist however any Socialist today that isn't rallying behind China and CPC isn't a socialist worth organising with given the state of class forces, the psyhopathic global hegemon and the absolute cult of the individual. I'm not sure if other shitlibs here realise but we are on the eve of Ww3 and China and Russia will be the targets.
Hm… I wonder who came before Khrushev who let them become nascent. His name escapes me, maybe you can help?
Absolutely. Stalin was too soft hearted in letting a previous Trotskyite come to power and handwaving his Trotskyism as something Kruschev had just flirted with in his youth. If Stalin hadn't been a shitlib maybe we would still have a Workers State
A later Soviet investigative commission found
Sent in by the Kruschevites and later those under Gorbachev lol.
Those 2 kept the Tukhachevsky transcripts confidential until 2000 when Colonel Alksnis was allowed to read them because he asked the Secret services and he was a Colonel in the Russian army (the transcript was released in full in 2018). Colonel Alksnis was a committed anti-Stalinist. HIs grandfather had been executed alongside Tukhachevsky for the same conspiracy. So why wouldn't he be an anti-Stalinist, his grandfather had been shot and his grandma spent 13 years in a gulag and exile? After reading the transcripts he came away convinced they were guilty.
Colonel Alksnis also points out the archives have been "cleaned" under each successive Leader.
For me, I.V. Stalin and his time is a very sore and relevant issue until now.
My grandfather – the commander of the second rank, deputy commissar of defense of the USSR for aviation Yakov Ivanovich (Jekabs Janovich) Alksnis, was shot in July 1938. His wife (my grandmother), Kristina Karlovna Mednis-Alksnis, as a member of the family of the traitor to the Motherland (CSIR), spent 13 years in camps and exiles. My father, Imant Yakovlevich, at the age of 10 was left without parents and until the age of 30 wore the stigma “son of an enemy of the people.” He found his mother only in 1957.
Judging by the materials of the case, the first interrogation took place only in January 1938. At the same time, judging by the 1956 rehabilitation materials filed in the same case, my grandfather was repeatedly summoned for interrogations and “beat out” evidence from him. But where are these protocols with “knocked out” testimonies, why were they not in the file?
After reviewing the transcript of the Tukhachevsky process, I realized that this process is also not so simple. My conviction that Tukhachevsky and his colleagues were simply forced to incriminate themselves under torture was seriously shaken, because judging by the transcript, they gave their testimonies quite sincerely. After reviewing the transcript of the process, I came to the conclusion that there was still a “military conspiracy”, or something like that, in the Red Army.
In 2000, I was elected a deputy of the State Duma, and I turned to the Director of the FSB, N. Patrushev, with a request to allow me to again familiarize myself with my grandfather’s criminal case. I was again invited to the Lubyanka, or rather, to the Kuznetsk bridge in the reading room of the FSB, and I was given a familiar criminal case.
I began to leaf through it, checking the records of 1990, and suddenly, to my amazement, I discovered that it lacked some important documents. For example, the NKVD intelligence report dated 1932 disappeared that the Latvian military attache stated in a private conversation with our agent that the Latvian General Staff has its own people among the military leaders of the Red Army. Among other surnames, the name of my grandfather was also mentioned there.
In 1990, I was very doubtful of this report, since it was unlikely that my grandfather could be an agent of the Latvian General Staff; according to the recollections of my grandmother, he was a stony-stone Bolshevik. But the very fact of the disappearance of this and some other documents allows me to conclude that the “cleaning” of archives continues to this day. The question arises: why?
So, in the archives there are documents that are not satisfied with the current government. The archives were “cleaned” under Stalin, under Khrushchev, under Gorbachev. “Cleaned” under Yeltsin.
Further the son of the traitor understood what had happened in Soviet society when the Soviet Union collapsed
My father was very upset by the collapse of the country. This is surprising, but in spite of the fact that as a result of the tragic events of the 30s his whole life was broken, I did not have to meet a greater patriot of our country. His country died, and six months later, on July 17, 1992, at the age of 65, he also died as a result of a heart attack.
A month before, he and I, at the dacha, at evening tea, once had a frank conversation about what was happening, and suddenly my father said: “If Stalin was alive, he would not have allowed this mess.”
I was shocked! My father, an ardent anti-Stalinist who hated Stalin with all the fibers of his soul, suddenly understood and forgave him …
https://diplomaticpost.co.uk/index.php/2020/07/15/the-moscow-trials-colonel-viktor-alksnis-read-the-tukhachevsky-transcript-and-came-away-convinced-he-was-guilty/
Stalin wrecked the military, stripped the party of it’s most dedicated members (
Stalin cleaned out the fifth column in the military who people like Tukhachevsky Trots told us for years were "dedicated leaders" instead of the fifth column traitors that they were. All over Europe countries fell at the slightest touch of the Nazi Army due to fifth column collaboration but in the Soviet Union we're expected to believe a lot of these generals and military leaders - only 20 years ago were probably White Guardists and monarchists fighting against the Bolsheviks alongside Germany and the other 13 capitalist nations - couldn't possibly have collaborated.
As to the "wrecking the army" comment- feel free to listen to Anti-Communist Stephen Kotkin say that historians have largely got the beginning of WW2 wrong on Stalin
(Paraphrasing) Our current understanding of ww2 history is wrong. What we currently think is the Soviets were a disaster at the beginning and the Soviets learned how to become good commanders. What we instead see now is that these tremendous losses at the beginning were precisely necessary as they blunted the German army and killed it's momentum. So what we currently believe is that Stalin was responsible for disasters at the beginning but what we now believe were necessary to kill the Germans momentum and grind them into a war of attrition
Stephen Kotkin - Stalin At War - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NV-hq2akCQ
We're not gonna hear about Stalins supposed failure on the eve of the war to move troops up to the front in order to be ready. He was urged to do so by his two top commanders - Zhukov and Timoshenko. That's because they were idiots. They didn't understand blitzkreig. Blitzkreig was not about capturing territory. It was about destroying the fighting capacity of your enemy. The more troops you move to the frontier the more troops will be destroyed and the less fighting capacity you have and the more likelihood you'll be defeated. So Stalins refusal to move more troops to the frontier zone was absolutely correct.
(Ibid)
You're not going to hear about Stalins "supposed failure" to prepare for the War. Nevermind the Soviet Union was armed to the teeth. Yes it had the worlds largest army. Yes it had the most aircraft and tanks. Essentially it had too much stuff because it had been building for war for a decade.
(Ibid)
I figured you'd trot out the Alksnis thing, yet all his essay does is state how he himself is unsure what happened because the records were tampered with again and again beginning with the Stalin era. So that's neither here nor there.
Saying Stalin's generals had no idea of what Blitzkrieg implies is not a path you'd want to take because it leads directly to the Deep Battle doctrine (the Blitzkrieg being a crude simplification of it) that was developed theoretically and was being trained for practically by the very military leaders that were purged. Even Voroshilov himself, who you think highly of based on your previous writings, bemoaned how much the purges crippled the army's abilities to conduct modern warfare. Grinding the Nazis to a halt through attrition, over the bodies of Soviet men who were an immense, nay irreparable loss to the Soviet society is anything but an ingenious strategy - it is squarely an atavistic step back. For far too long have socialists hemmed the tides of reaction with their dead bodies, their victories pyrrhic in all but name, so the rejection of a highly innovative military doctrine and the liquidation of the most capable cadres able to carry it out should itself be considered treason. Look at the biographies of all the commanders purged and tell me in all honesty that these were not fighters completely dedicated to the Soviet project. Instead we got a despicable sadistic snivelling weasel of a Stalin protegé like Kulik.
So no, phantom Trotskyism doesn't cut it (imagine believing that Trotskyists were pulling the strings in capitalist nations which is why they surrendered so quickly, lmao). And I'm not even saying that all this political degeneracy is on Stalin, rather the impetus for back-stabbing, self aggrandizement, hubris, careerism and settling of personal scores is a huge problem that looms over every attempt to organise a new society that still has very few people addressing it, and if we are to do more than just break the status quo is in desperate need of being addressed. But Stalin most certainly contributed to this deterioration.
I figured you’d trot out the Alksnis thing, yet all his essay does is state how he himself is unsure what happened because the records were tampered with again and again beginning with the Stalin era. So that’s neither here nor there.
Except for...you know the below but we all ignore what we want to ignore I guess
My conviction that Tukhachevsky and his colleagues were simply forced to incriminate themselves under torture was seriously shaken, because judging by the transcript, they gave their testimonies quite sincerely. After reviewing the transcript of the process, I came to the conclusion that there was still a “military conspiracy”, or something like that, in the Red Army.
As to
Grinding the Nazis to a halt through attrition, over the bodies of Soviet men who were an immense, nay irreparable loss to the Soviet society is anything but an ingenious strategy - it is squarely an atavistic step back.
Whew lad this is literal nazi propaganda that the Red Army "ground the bodies of soviet men". The losses of army personnel(soldiers) is quite comparable to Nazi losses. The Nazis did not give a fig for soviet civilian life which is where the immense 27 million dead in the USSR comes from
So no, phantom Trotskyism doesn’t cut it (imagine believing that Trotskyists were pulling the strings in capitalist nations which is why they surrendered so quickly, lmao).
Are you capable of reading? I said collaborators not Trotskyists in other countries.
As to Trotsky himself... Trotsky was busy writing about how the Ukraine should be independent in 1939 lol . All the Communist forces in Ukraine were pro Stalin and all the independence forces were bourgeois nationalists and fascists (who would go on to collaborate with Nazis and setup their own SS divisions in the occupied Nazi army). He wrote this knowing that Hitler had described occupying Ukraine for Lebensraum and the raw materials there. Trotsky also wrote in Revolution Betrayed
If the war should remain only a war, the defeat of the Soviet Union would be inevitable.
IN a technical, economic and military sense imperialism is incomparably more strong.
If it is not paralysed by revolution in the West, imperialism will sweep away the regime which issued from the October Revolution
And that
One swift kick in the doors of the Soviet Union will bring the whole rotten foundations crashing down.
Anyway the point is that Tukhachevsky was executed for wanting to portion off the Ukraine to Hitler - that was largely what the Moscow trials were about. To retain a rump Russian state with Trotsky as leader by giving concessions to Nazi Germany
I can provide the 1000 page testimony that the Soviet government released of the trials that were open to the worlds press
But apparently according to you AntiCommunists this is all faked and the lengthy, long 1000 pages of confessions and testimony were stage managed, scripted and beaten out of them. This is despite the fact a few of them (who Stalin thought were guilty) lived until after the Soviet collapse and said in 1993 that they were treated quite well by the NKVD interrogators and even when the grandchildren of those executed believe they were guilty and their testimonies were given frankly and honestly.
So there's no conversation to be had as you're fanatics
The Block of Rights and Trotskyites
Edit: I knew that Colonel Alksnis was more explicit regarding the trials so I found that source
“My grandfather and Tukhachevsky were friends. And grandfather was on the judicial panel that judged both Tukhachevsky and Eideman. My interest in this case became even stronger after the well-known publications of procuror Viktorov, who wrote that Iakov Alksnis was very active at the trial, harrassed the accused. . . . But in the trial transcript everything was just the opposite. Grandfather only asked two or three questions during the entire trial. But the strangest thing is the behavior of the accused. Newspaper accounts claim that all the defendants denied their guilt completely. But according to the transcript they fully admitted their guilt. I realize that an admission of guilt itself can be the result of torture. But in the transcript it was something else entirely: a huge amount of detail, long dialogues, accusations of one another, a mass of precision. It’s simply impossible to stage-manage something like this. . . . I know nothing about the nature of the conspiracy. But of the fact that there really did exist a conspiracy within the Red Army and that Tukhachevsky participated in it I am completely convinced today.”
–Colonel Alksnis (Elementy, 2000)
From a further interview of Alksnis by Vladimir Bobrov:
Alksnis: I turned the pages of the transcript and had more questions than answers. I came away with the impression that, obviously, there had really been a conspiracy. But this is what struck me: in the transcript there are parts which attest to the sincerity of what the defendants said (no matter who claims that the trial was an organized show, that they worked on the defendants specially so that they would give the necessary confessions.) Imagine this. Let’s say, Tukhachevsky is telling about a meeting with the German military attaché in a dacha near Moscow and at that moment Primakov interrupts him and says “Mikhail Nikolaevich, you are mistaken. This meeting did not take place in your office at the dacha, but was on the veranda.” I think that it would have been impossible to “direct” things such that Tukhachevsky said precisely that and that Primakov would then make a correction like that.
Bobrov: Very well. But was there anything there that made you think that the trial had been scripted and directed anyway?
Alksnis: No, it would have been impossible to script and direct a trial such as is in the transcript.
Bobrov: That is, you wish to state that, having read the transcript, you did not find in it any traces of any kind of staging?
Alksnis: Yes, yes. On top of that all of them confessed, and when they all admitted guilt in their last words, stating that they had been participants in the conspiracy and knowing that after that execution awaited them, it is just impossible to imagine that they forced them all to make such admissions and declarations.
Bobrov: What was the main point of accusation of the “conspirators”?
Alksnis: Everything was there: espionage, preparation for a military coup, sabotage, wrecking.
Bobrov: And what does “espionage” mean? You were talking about the meeting at the dacha.
Alksnis: Yes, yes, with the German military attaché. They were talking about arranging coordination with the German military, contacts were going on with them.
Bobrov: One last question. In your interview with “Elementy” you talked about some kind of “cannon” that might shoot at our own times from back in the 30s. What did you have in mind?
Alksnis: If an objective research project on the events of those years were to be done, free of ideological dogmas, then a great deal could change in our attitude towards those years and towards the personalities of that epoch. And so it would be a “bomb” that would cause some problems. (Bobrov)
During the last years of his life, long after de-stalinization Molotov spoke about this issue in an interview with Feliks Chuev published in 1993 as Molotov Remembers. The Khruschev government had made de-stalinization official policy, similarly in the Gorbachev years it was political suicide to oppose the anti-stalin line. However Molotov did so anyway. He testified to the accuracy of the Trial findings:
“The right wing already had a channel to Hitler even before this. Trotsky was definitely connected to him, that’s beyond any doubt…. Many of the ranking military officers were also involved. That goes without saying.”
-(Molotov Remembers p. 275)
How is it Nazi propaganda if I'm just re-quoting what you wrote about the "necessity to blunt the German Army" and "grind them into a war of attrition"? Unless of course you're saying that you were spewing Nazi propaganda yourself. So no, neither was it a necessary or clever way to wage war nor were the combat losses equal (2:1 is the general estimate). On top of that, positing that Stalin was such a genius commander that he foresaw everything is the height of idolatry. The Red Army had the most advanced military doctrine way before Hitler's Blitzkrieg and could have nipped that onslaught in the bud but the cadres capable of doing so got purged, pure and simple.
And you seem to evade my other point - if the testimonies were so reliable, if the sentencing was so fair and commensurate how come those conducting the tribunals got purged themselves shortly thereafter? Traitors sentencing traitors sentencing traitors seems like an even much more elaborate conspiracy than anything you propose.
As to Trotsky, what he's describing there is the inherent weakness of the Soviet state as he perceived it, not some diabolical rubbing of hands at the prospect of the USSR's demise. That his insights turned out to be wrong speaks to his remoteness from the contemporary Soviet society and culture and nothing more (also so that you don't lob false accusations - I'm not a Trotskyist and don't think he should have taken Stalin's place).
A war of attrition is a bloody fight to the death
over the bodies of Soviet men who were an immense, nay irreparable loss to the Soviet society is anything but an ingenious strategy
Claiming Stalin hurled bodies at the German Army by the millions is nazi propaganda and what a lot of the nazis wrote about to justify their failures in war. Yes the greatest battles ever known on earth (amount of men) were faced on the Eastern Front. But no Stalin did not send "waves of soldiers to their deaths" as you parrot Nazi officers. How do you not know this?
On top of that, positing that Stalin was such a genius commander that he foresaw everything is the height of idolatry.
You'll notice I never posited that Stalin was a genius commander. I claimed he cleaned out the fifth column then refuted your claims that he "wrecked the army" by executing traitors with some of what Stephen Kotkin thinks - I did not put my own opinion on Stalin as a commander
And you seem to evade my other point - if the testimonies were so reliable, if the sentencing was so fair and commensurate how come those conducting the tribunals got purged themselves shortly thereafter? Traitors sentencing traitors sentencing traitors seems like an even much more elaborate conspiracy than anything you propose.
I'll return that point with the below
Alexander Zinoviev (no relation to Grigory Zinoviev) was a political dissident in the USSR and was eventually exiled from the country. In 1939 he was accused of a plot to murder Stalin as part of an underground organization, but was eventually released.
He spoke of those years after the fall of the Soviet Union, actually admitting to his guilt. So why didn't the NKVD beat out a testimony from him and execute him? Why was he treated so lightly after the supposed horrors of the "being beaten and forced to confess to fake crimes then summarily executed? It seems awfully dangerous to let a convinced assassin alive in 1939 even if he's in exile.
“I was already a confirmed anti-Stalinist at the age of seventeen …. The idea of killing Stalin filled my thoughts and feelings …. We studied the ‘technical’ possibillities of an attack …. We even practiced. If they had condemned me to death in 1939, their decision would have been just. I had made up a plan to kill Stalin; wasn’t that a crime? When Stalin was still alive, I saw things differently… Until Stalin’s death I was anti-Stalinist” –Alexander Zinoviev (The remorse of a dissident: Alexander Zinoviev on Stalin and the dissolution of the USSR
As to Trotsky, what he’s describing there is the inherent weakness of the Soviet state as he perceived it, not some diabolical rubbing of hands at the prospect of the USSR’s demise. That his insights turned out to be wrong speaks to his remoteness from the contemporary Soviet society and culture and nothing more (also so that you don’t lob false accusations - I’m not a Trotskyist and don’t think he should have taken Stalin’s place).
In order to believe that Trotsky was not organised for overthrowing Stalin and using terrorism to do it you need to basically ignore all the piled up evidence that now exists. You need to ignore his REvolution Betrayed were he equates Soviet Socialism with German Fascism and that if "fascism is to be overthrown it must end in the overthrow of the Comintern".
The evidence Piere Broue and Arch Getty uncovered of the secret Bloc of Trotskyites and Zinovieites in 1932. You need to believe the cartoonishly evil propaganda that Stalin was somehow able to orchestrate a Moscow Trial that was open to the worlds press and ambassadors and that the accused were men meekly beaten into submission and rehearsed to an art the repetition of a script that spans a 1000 pages.
For example the American ambassador (trained as lawyer) Joseph Davies was convinced the accused were guilty. Yet somehow West, separated by the distance of 80 years (of anticommunist Cold war propaganda) and without actually seeing the trial with their own eyes, somehow think it is fabricated. Do you see how ridiculous this is?
What's more if it were true why was the Tukhachevksy transcript classified under Kruschev and remained classified until 2018?
Thanks for putting all of this effort into your posts. The rhetoric and propaganda around Stalin is so incredibly hard to untangle.
Which of the accused were guilty though? The ones who were tried or the ones who tried them, or the ones who tried the jury? You realise how ridiculous it is that somehow the overwhelming majority of delegates, central committee members and army officers, people who often fought for the establishment of the Soviet state at great risk to their lives were all plotting all this time to destroy that same state?
And again I'm not regurgitating Nazi propaganda, I was merely following your argument to its logical conclusion. I don't think that the Soviets were predominantly using human wave tactics, even though some use of the grunts was imho wasteful at some points I understand the delicate balance between the safety of the men and the need for a speedy advance and the necessity to prioritize the latter now and again, what I'm saying is that the awful losses, the almost complete routing of Red forces at the beginning of the war are undeniable and at the same time were preventable if the Army remained competent, which was severely undermined by the purges (see Voroshilov's complaint after the Winter War). There would have been no need for the outdated war of attrition if the Red Army were poised to strike first just before Hitler could amass all his troops at the border. But such thinking was discredited because the people who created the theoretical underpinnings of Deep Battle and were training to put it into practice were murdered and became the unmentionable.
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Gorbachev market reforms happened at the same time as social reforms. They lost control over the economy and at the same time they allowed foreign media into the country to fuck around in major ways. This was especially bad because citizens haven't really heard opposition media in their entire lives.
He wanted to reform the USSR into what was essentially modern day Denmark and totally failed at doing so in every way. He actually thought Bush 41 was a good faith actor.
Also pizza hut.
Five sentences? Did you say several long pages?
Seriously though that’s a great summary if you want to read a little more.
they voted to after Gorbachev crashed the economy & sold off the public sphere to oligarchs & let PepsiCo rape the country
what triggered the collapse
the life of everything is determined by the material conditions and our interactions with them
There was a series of economic crises starting in the late 70s, with drop in agricultural production as farmers moved to cities. You had long lines and shortages between late 70s - early 80s. The Gorbachev economic reforms were meant to address this. The free political climate that followed glasnost allowed the fostering nationalist ideological movements, resulting in break-away republics by the end of the decade.
By allowed, here we mean, "Actively seeded and funded by the CIA for the purposes of allowing nationalists to break up the USSR"
