• aleph@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Many biographers have cited it, including Simon Montefiore is his book The Red Tsar, which was very well researched and shows Stalin as multi-faceted and charismatic, albeit deeply flawed.

      The idea that Stalin was brutal is ridiculous.

      Um, have you ever read a book about the man? The Great Purges between 1936-1938 and his policies towards the Soviet peasantry are just two examples of his ruthlessness.

        • aleph@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          The great purges removed undesirable elements from the CPSU.

          Undesirable from Stalin’s point of view, certainly.

          You can’t name a single ill action taken towards Soviet peasants.Stalin brought them nothing but benefits

          Hoo, boy. I would advise you to research how many people died during forced collectivization and how much death was caused by the confiscation of grain by the NKVD and the Red Army before you start making statements like that.

          • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            how much death was caused by the confiscation of grain by the NKVD and the Red Army

            None. None was caused by this. The death was caused by the hoarding of it for profit. The confiscation was a response to that hoarding.

            • aleph@lemm.ee
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              1 year ago

              This theory is pretty roundly discredited in academia, though. The consensus view is that while there was a drought that lasted several years, the starvation that occured was exacerbated by the policies set by the Politburo, including:

              • Excessive quotas leading to the reduction in crop rotation and leaving land fallow, which in turn lead to weaker crop yields

              • The fall in livestock numbers following forced collectivization

              • Poor quality harvest resulting from an unsettled agriculture industry that resulted from political upheaval

              So yes, nature itself was partly to blame but the refusal to deviate from the unrealistic goals set by the people in charge was the reason why the grain shortages and resulting famines were so much worse that they ought to have been.

              • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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                1 year ago

                You’ve missed out the main cause, which was a lack of oversight over figures that were being reported by the farms. They trusted the numbers they were being given which proved to be false reporting, which led to the incorrect quotas and crop rotation mistakes, which led to all the other mistakes.

                This was a blunder that was corrected later (with extra third party checking of numbers). Solving it.

                Keep in mind this was the very first time central planning had been applied to a task like this. The notion that the numbers reported would be wrong was not something anyone expected because there was no precedent to go on. All of these “incorrect policies” that you blame them for are a product of the incorrect figures that they had. Figures that were incorrect because kulaks were grain hoarding to sell for profit then reporting incorrect figures.

              • UnicodeHamSic [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                1 year ago

                Are you telling me a group of men with an 1800s education didn’t have the most up to date agricultural science? Sounds like the fault of the people who educated them to me.

            • aleph@lemm.ee
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              1 year ago

              Asked and answered: I cited the specific book that referenced it, among others.

              For the record, I am more than capable of recognizing the positive aspects of the USSR - I just don’t like the simple-minded good vs bad binary thinking that often plagues these discussions.

              • Alaskaball [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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                1 year ago

                Asked and answered: I cited the specific book that referenced it, among others.

                You just waved a few titles around without actually citing evidence.

                Evidence is when you type out directly the material you’re talking about, followed by the source you got it from, the page(s) and paragraph(s).

                You want an example of what actual quality citations look like please take a brief moment to read through some of the citations in this post

                Edit: user I was replying to says they cited multiple sources. Just wanted to say they only cited one author - who’s more a story-teller than a historian - while handwaving about “many authors saying it’s true” without listing anyone. They completely rely on hearsay and vibes for evidence and not concrete source material for their worldview.

              • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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                1 year ago

                I am more than capable of recognizing the positive aspects of the USSR

                Like what? You’re only saying negatives. Let’s get your positives.

                • aleph@lemm.ee
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                  1 year ago

                  That’s fair.

                  As for the pluses, I’d list:

                  • Women’s rights
                  • Improvements in health care and social services
                  • Progress in education and the sciences
                  • Economic growth
                  • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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                    1 year ago

                    Add in these next time.

                    • Rent being 5% of your income.
                    • Elimination of unemployment.
                    • Elimination of homelessness.
      • star_wraith [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        I’m probably less enthused about Stalin than your average Hexbear user. While I’ll fully recognize Stalin’s faults and harmful actions, what bugs me about liberal “Stalin bad” takes is a refusal to acknowledge the objectively impossible problems the USSR had to address in the 20s and 30s. With the peasants, for example, you can’t just let them continue on with small plots and wooden tools. You do that and eventually the cities starve, industrialization never happens, and the Nazis steamroll them back past the Urals (killing tens of millions in the process). The rollout of collectivization was a shit show but it’s not unreasonable for a socialist country to push for collective ownership of land.

      • LiberalSoCalist@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Kotkin’s first volume on Stalin is a far better work that I’d recommend as far as biographies go. Kotkin is very obviously an anti-communist, but even a turbo Stalinite like Grover Furr finds few academic faults with that particular work. The other volumes are less stellar though.

        There’s also the recently authorized re-translation of Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend by Demenico Losurdo which has a free PDF available. It offers insight on a perspective of Stalin that seeks to de-mythologize the “monster.”

        As for Montefiore and authors of his ilk, I wouldn’t rely too much on narratives spun by pop history writers and journalists.