Date: Thu, 11 Aug 1994 08:24:08 -0400 (EDT) From: Philip Goldstein <pgold-AT-strauss.udel.edu> Subject: Re: Stalinism, Czarism etc. Thanks, Michael Dietz, for the historical analysis of the RUssian revolution. My feeling is that Russian historians provide the best account of what happened. I recommend, in particular, Moishe Lewin's work, including _The Gorbachev Phenomenon_ and _The Making of the Soviet System_. He agrees with your argument, that the conditions for liberal democracy were clearly absent because the Czars failed to establish a civil society, but he says that conditions after the revolution led to Stalinism. These conditions include a)the nexus of rural peasants and lords. This nexus blocked the formation of capitalist markets and made the state-based, development of capitalism necessary. b) the civil wars between the mensheviks and the bolsheviks. These wars killed off educated workers and destroyed industry. As a result, the peasants, who got land under Lenin, retreated into primitive communes which provided little goods for the cities, and the party, isolated from the whole society, recruited the authoritarian peasants who expected orders, not thought. The bureaucrats who fled the revolution also came back into the party, Czarist bureaucrats, I mean. Lewin implies that Lenin's NEP, which opened Russia to capitalist investment, was a wise policy, but Stalin ended it. He began a crash program to industrialize society by terrorizing the peasants. Lewin implies that this program echoed Czarist programs -- hostility to the peasants, revolution from above. In short, Lewin describes the changes and the ruptures between Lenin and Stalin and attributes Stalinism to new conditions, not to what you call Lenin's conspiratorial practices, I think. Totalitarian theorists, who trace a line from Marx to Stalin, agree with you but ignore Russian conditions, except to say that they made revolution possible. In any case, no one would dispute the claim that liberal democracy and civil society were not possible.
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