Date: Mon, 5 Aug 1996 13:51:40 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Re: Stalin explained


On Mon, 5 Aug 1996, MARK ADKINS wrote:

> In a previous article, Christian (harlowc-AT-tidepool.com) wrote:
> 
> >Stalin's [horrors] can not be blamed on Marxism, marxist theory, or Lenin 
> >and Trotsky.  The blame is to be shared by the historical position of 
> >pre-revolutionary Russia and Stalin's own failure to READ Marx and Lenin, 
> >and to understand what it was he was attempting.  Stalin misuderstood the
> >role of the CP and was in a position to use it to his own egotiscal fantasia.
> >
> >This situation is much like yours.  You need to READ [period] before you 
> >come here and tell the list that they need to read stuff outside of our 
> >ideological camps.

> All is now clear.  Stalin consolidated dictatorship into his own hands
> not because the Bolshevik institutions of state power lent themselves
> to this -- indeed, already constituted oligarchic dictatorship and
> merely lacked an emperor -- but because Stalin failed to read Marx
> and Lenin and misunderstood the CP, and because of a Czarist government
> which had long since been replaced.
> [Sorry -- I just couldn't resist one last reply to a particularly
> fatuous message.  This really is my last post to the list.  Honest!]

	What other option do you think Stalin had other than dictatorship
and isolation at the time? What type of a revolution could Stalin have
made without protecting his economy from Western influence (as in cheap
consumer goods)? Should Stalin have continued on the guided capitalist road
that Lenin took after the 1917 revolution? Or should he have just given up
on the revolution when Europe turned away from Bolshevism and towards
fascism? What would have you done if you were in Stalin's position in
1924?

Kevin
Cols, Oh





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