Goes down in history as the most authoritarian guy in history or whatever but Stalin couldnt even find a successor that wouldnt immediately denounce him and his policies. How do we learn from this? Something seems wrong here
Oh you mean the communists murdering a bunch of soldiers? It’s called the black book of communism sweetie. You should look at it sometime :)
Oh you mean the communists murdering a bunch of soldiers?
I mean, that kinda happened too. They executed like twenty thousand Polish officers in one go in 1940.
his successor died of alcohol poisoning, and he was killed before the great purge part 2, after that the Corn-lord just got lucky and he imprisoned all his rivals
Damn and Death of Stalin really went out of their way to make Kruschev and Zhukov look like heros.
The Soviet Union fell because they didn't take advantage of computers
This sounds like a technocrat, Elon-Musk-Will-Solve-Everything type take.
Mass demoralization. No one believed in the project anymore and that meant a bunch of alcoholics could come in and fuck everything up and there was no one there to stop them
Its a shame, just 10 years before they had defeated fascism and liberated half of europe. Things were looking up and it was all thrown away :/
Nah. I think that's more of a Brezhnev era thing.
Personally, I don't think Khrushchev did anything too bad. I wouldn't trace the collapse to him alone.
Because the purges were more than anything mass paranoia that permanently damaged the party.
It was always going to collapse once he personally starved all of Ukraine and executed 60 billion people.
Well compare it to China.
Deng Xiaoping denounced the gang of four and excesses of the cultural revolution, but also said that Mao was and always will be an important figure. That they will remember and celebrate his accomplishments, his contributions to theory, etc.. but his mistakes don't need to be celebrated. He explicitly said that they wouldn't do to Mao what the Soviets did to Stalin.
Socialism needs the same thing and more, as it must resist imperialism.
The central point imo.
A revolution isn't complete until it becomes the global hegemon it seems....and might not be truly secure for centuries. The eternal science.
it'll be very interesting to see what happens after the Xi era. He has done, in many ways, unprecedented work in terms of trying to root out corruption and set China on a durable long term path.
Absence of antithesis in the realm of public politics, which means all the arguments where invisible inside the party and between the people in private. Should have let either official anarchist or at least trot party to exist.
This is kind of a recurring theme in history. If too much depends on a single individual, it causes a major political crisis when they die. It's sort of ironic that this happened with Stalin, because he was a big fan of Ivan the Terrible, who also failed to create a durable system of government to outlive him and essentially caused the Time of Troubles after he died.
