Opinion of Vladimir Lenin? (user search)
       |           

Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.
Did you miss your activation email?
June 05, 2024, 01:23:35 AM
News: Election Simulator 2.0 Released. Senate/Gubernatorial maps, proportional electoral votes, and more - Read more

  Talk Elections
  General Politics
  Individual Politics (Moderator: The Dowager Mod)
  Opinion of Vladimir Lenin? (search mode)
Pages: [1]
Poll
Question: ??
#1
FF
 
#2
HP
 
Show Pie Chart
Partisan results

Total Voters: 75

Author Topic: Opinion of Vladimir Lenin?  (Read 2474 times)
Statilius the Epicurean
Thersites
Junior Chimp
*****
Posts: 5,615
United Kingdom


« on: January 26, 2022, 07:31:46 PM »

Massive FF and a necessary bulwark against the White Terror.

The Reds had a war to win and revolution is not a dinner party.

The Bolsheviks started the civil war by couping the Provisional Government.
Logged
Statilius the Epicurean
Thersites
Junior Chimp
*****
Posts: 5,615
United Kingdom


« Reply #1 on: January 26, 2022, 07:54:04 PM »

Massive FF and a necessary bulwark against the White Terror.

The Reds had a war to win and revolution is not a dinner party.

The Bolsheviks started the civil war and the Terror by couping the Provisional Government.

The Provisional Government screwed themselves by not ending the war with Germany, which is why the revolution happened to begin with.

The point is that it was Lenin's initiative to unleash civil war and terror by deciding to coup the Provisional Government. So being a bulwark against the Whites is not a particularly strong point in his favour, given it was his actions that precipitated the civil war that nearly destroyed Russia.
Logged
Statilius the Epicurean
Thersites
Junior Chimp
*****
Posts: 5,615
United Kingdom


« Reply #2 on: January 26, 2022, 08:20:14 PM »
« Edited: January 26, 2022, 08:24:45 PM by Statilius the Epicurean »

Anyway the funniest thing about PSOL's post is the claim that the NEP was supposedly Lenin's major mistake, when it prevented economic collapse and saved the Bolsheviks from being overthrown in 1921. I do not like Lenin at all, but along with Brest Litovsk it shows Lenin's genuine political skill in allowing the necessary ideological flexibility at critical moments, unlike the instincts of most revolutionaries.
Logged
Statilius the Epicurean
Thersites
Junior Chimp
*****
Posts: 5,615
United Kingdom


« Reply #3 on: January 28, 2022, 12:29:40 PM »

Now this is just bull••••. The only people that had control over that land were Bolshevik-sponsored NEPmen who engaged in a parasitic relationship with the peasantry, so much so that there was incredible strain on Soviet stability and peasant-state relations that only got repaired and rectified after the Second World War. No one, and I mean no one is free to the land under capitalism, just capital itself.

The collective system was more democratic, more stable, and gave peasants the largest say in governing the land than in any other period and by the late 1930s the damage was getting quickly overdone.

The entire motivation behind collectivisation was to increase party-state control over the peasantry in order to extract more grain from them to fund Stalin's crash industrialisation. This is well documented. Of course the rate of extraction exacerbated famine that killed millions of people.

Soviet agriculture was permanently crippled by collectivisation, to the extent that it was having to import American and Canadian grain in the 70s and 80s to avoid shortages. Inefficiency was such that the USSR had to spend upwards of 10% of its GDP on agriculture subsidies.
Logged
Statilius the Epicurean
Thersites
Junior Chimp
*****
Posts: 5,615
United Kingdom


« Reply #4 on: January 29, 2022, 11:18:14 PM »

The irony of Trotsky is that his political programme was completely stolen by Stalin: terror, bureaucracy, central planning, rapid industrialisation, the militarisation of labour, subordination of trade unions, even socialism in one country and alliances with capitalist powers were all advocated for by Trotsky when he was in power from 1917-23 and occasionally after.

Bukharin I agree is the most interesting and sympathetic what if among the Old Bolsheviks, but continuing the NEP ran counter to the ideological instincts of most of the party leadership.
Logged
Pages: [1]  
Jump to:  


Login with username, password and session length

Terms of Service - DMCA Agent and Policy - Privacy Policy and Cookies

Powered by SMF 1.1.21 | SMF © 2015, Simple Machines

Page created in 0.033 seconds with 13 queries.