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.

  • JoeySteel [comrade/them]
    1·
    4 years ago

    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?

    • Janked [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Thanks for putting all of this effort into your posts. The rhetoric and propaganda around Stalin is so incredibly hard to untangle.

    • Rev [none/use name]
      ·
      4 years ago

      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.