Date: 30 Mar 96 03:00:01 EST
From: "Chris, London" <100423.2040-AT-compuserve.com>
To: marxismlist a <marxism-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU>
Subject: Godena's limited concession on Stalin.


Louis Godena bristles in his reply with leaden sarcasm about
officer Burford, but at least took the debate a step forward.

I agree with the comment:  
"I am reminded of Alec Nove's remark about the Hitler-Stalin Pact of
1939: "By twentieth-century international standards of behavior it was not
worse than many other things that were done in and by the West." "

The Anglo-French attack on Egypt in 1956, in secret collusion with
Israel, flashes through my mind. 

What I have been trying to urge on this l'st is that to have any 
understanding of what happened in the Soviet Union we need some 
degree of dialectics. What went wrong was indeed not all the personal
fault of Stalin, though his signature is as a matter of historical record on 
the death certificates of several thousand, if I read Getty and Manning 
correctly. 

Louis Godena thinks he has to denounce me as petty bourgeois and 
middle strata, (I am of course a member of the intelligentsia) to 
defend himself against an implication that he had made a confession.
Of course he had not made a "confession". But in agreeing that historical 
clarification is 
needed of the apparent 500,000 politically linked deaths in 
the Soviet Union in the thirties, he is saying that it is right,
in his opinion, to recognise the efforts in building socialism and 
resisting fascism, but that is separate from lamenting the unnecessary
loss of life in the purges. That is to be welcomed because it means
that the Stalin admirers are not necessarily holocaust denyers, 
which is what I think some list members took them to be.

His later contribution in reply to Lisa, I find wholly acceptable
as a statement of willingness to tolerate and debate serious
differences within the marxist tradition.


Chris





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