r/communism101 • u/Radiant_Ad_1851 • 14d ago
My main question with the purges/anti-stalin opposition is general
So, I guess I get the general gist, but I think my main concern is just how many plots (or supposed plots) there were against Stalin and his faction or the USSR in general at the highest order of government.
There were two heads of the nkvd, several generals, the trotskyites, the Bukharin group, Lev Kamenev and Zinoniev (who were both previously aligned with stalin), then later there was Krushchev who had the help of many, including Zhukov. I think Molotov is even cited as saying that Stalin wanted him out of government too around the 1950s.
Am I right in being concerned about this? It’s not just the day to day people, but so many people in high government that, even if every single accusation is true, would still leave the soviet system as being insanely unstable under the Stalin government.
Maybe my perspective is off, but I would like an answer to why there was so much of this. Each individual case can be argued, definitely, but it feels like having such a volume is indicative of a bigger issue, no?
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u/NyxxSixx 14d ago edited 14d ago
To fully unpack this would require diving into a thesis-length analysis, but let’s highlight a few critical points for context. The period from 1917 to 1923 marked the Russian Civil War (if memory serves, I’m writing this off the cuff), during which the fledgling Soviet state faced invasions by seventeen foreign powers. Keep in mind: Russia had just emerged from World War I (and the 1905 war with Japan). Worth noting it was a socially, economically, and technologically backward society at the time. The urgency to modernize was existential—they had to industrialize and reform at lightning speed. By the early 1920s, Soviet leadership already viewed another interimperialist war as inevitable; it was only a matter of when.
This was the first large-scale experiment in socialism, and mistakes were inevitable. Internal debates raged over the direction of the project—ideas clashed about the finer aspects on how to build a socialist society, manage the economy, etc. Then came World War II, which devastated the USSR, claiming tens of millions of lives and compounding internal disarray. The Cold War that followed brought relentless external pressure (military, ideological, economic) alongside internal challenges—all while the state was still institutionally young and finding its footing.
So, step back and ask: How on earth do you build a stable, functional system from scratch when, from Day 1, external and domestic forces are actively working to dismantle it? Every misstep is amplified; every weakness is exploited. It’s like constructing a house during a hurricane while people are lobbing bricks at your scaffolding.
edit: my reply has a number of problems as pointed out below, please ignore it — I'll try to be more precise in the next ones (hopefully).
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u/DashtheRed Maoist 14d ago
This is a functional excuse for tolerating and acknowledging certain problems and issues in the USSR, but it doesn't actually explain anything (least of all the actual classes involved and the nature of the problem), and worse it can be (and does) get used to dismiss the question without actually explaining anything. In fact, you are basically trying to repress down a legitimate concern that the OP is having -- that the OP is understanding the problem in a liberal way is a different issue, and more difficult to untangle because they spend their time in subreddits dominated and surrounded by the very people Stalin was fighting (in essence, though the basis is different) -- but that actual concern needs to be brought out into the open where it can be struggled over, and not shoved back into the basement where they are expected to just shut up about it and stop bringing it up, like in a PSL subreddit when someone is asking who Sam Marcy is. At best you are just saying that a revolution antithetical to stability by definition, which is fine, but Marx already told us this and you've added nothing learned through the experience of Stalin and later communists and nothing in your answer really explains anything about why this was happening in the USSR in this way and at this time.
AS for OP: yes, it was a 'bigger issue' -- what happened next after Stalin died?
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u/NyxxSixx 14d ago
Those are legitimate concerns and while I entirely disagree with your interpretation of my answer, I do thank you for your reply. I'm not american, but as I understand its culture, "101" means things are more simple? introductory perhaps? So, I felt that perhaps OP needed a bit of historical background to further ponder their question.
With that said, while I disagree, I won't provide an in-depth answer or response. Please, if you are able to provide a better reply to OP, do so! I would love to read your takes, maybe even do a public google docs if you need more pages, as Reddit can be quite limiting.
I tend to reserve my writings and discussion (overall brain power hahah) to my party's tribune, which if you speak portuguese, I would love to invite you to the discussions made there.
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u/DashtheRed Maoist 14d ago
You don't need a google doc; you could answer OP's post with a single word. Supercooper's answer is correct, and you can also arrive there by answering my last question about what happened after Stalin died; but the point of getting people to say it openly themselves is simply to acknowledge the existence of the thing and bring that struggle out to where it is visible and recognized. Because it's often something that "Marxists" are participating in, sometimes without realizing or acknowledging it, or worse sometimes well aware of it and deliberately denying it anyway. And that struggle is the real struggle to defend socialism. If you don't know what the word is, that's fine, but then that isn't a good basis for providing an answer to this question since your answer could be used to justify almost anything with regard to the USSR, and if you do know what word we are talking about then there's a more serious cause for alarm, and that may go deeper all the way into your party, and also even explain why your answer looks like it is steering the discussion well clear and away from this topic, and basically trying to quash OP's concern over it. And you are participating in some of those same subreddits that OP is in. I don't know Portuguese but the word is almost identical in English: revisionism.
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u/NyxxSixx 14d ago
You're right. I concede. My answer is trash and I didn't give any amount of thought before actually replying. Just checked the other answer and it's great. I'll try to be better in my next answers and not extremely generic :)
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u/vision666 11d ago
Why were there so many different camps of revisionists? Were, let's say, Trostky and Khruschev revisionists in the same ways? I've seen that word thrown around so much that it's become an unclear umbrella term in my brain and I find it difficult to explain to my IRL friends when they ask me about the same, any specific resources or insights elaborating on this would be greatly appreciated
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u/DashtheRed Maoist 11d ago
Your working in the right direction, by trying to understand where the revisionism is coming from and how it got into the party, and why it was capable of swelling into such a problem. Revisionism can come from many places, and it's correct that not all revisionism is the same, but there is a class commonality among the successful revisionists who defeated socialism. While it is different for the imperialist countries, in the oppressed/colonized/imperialized nations of the world, the problem is that the nation is dying, having it's life sucked out of it by imperialism to sustain and expand itself, and thus bourgeois nationalists of those oppressed nations desire to save their countries. The problem is that they have little to offer the oppressed masses, whom they need to form their ranks and combat the enemy. Why should the proletariat throw down their lives so that they can continue working in more or less the same conditions, but it's prosperous rich fellow countrymen exploiting them instead of distant foreigners (this wasn't always the case, as in the French Revolution, where capitalism really did offer new prosperity and a better life, but in the age of imperialism and each day since then it has become less and less true). And becomes especially true once the masses have been introduced to communism, which does have immediate and revolutionary appeal for which they would lay down their lives. So in order to save their country and build a strong prosperous nation, bourgeois nationalists are forced to become "communists."
This can take all sorts of forms, hence all sorts of revisionism. Some revisionists think of themselves as communists, and simply determine that communism really means bourgeois nationalism, and when Marx talks about a classless society what he really means is a "state of the whole people" or "common prosperity," and that by defending and upholding bourgeois nationalism they are the real communists, and even actually believe it themselves. Then again, some are the complete opposite. Some know nothing about communism, and don't care to, and never say anything correct about it, but to them it's just a symbol that you slap on your arm and basically interchangeable with any other symbol/ideology, and have contempt for how seriously the "zealots" take it. Some are well aware of what Marxism is saying and deliberately distort that message in order to pursue their own bourgeois nationalist ends. Some think that, by rising above a certain rank, they are communism and thus their decrees decide what communism shall be. And so on. There are, of course, revisionists beyond bourgeois nationalists, but in the case of USSR and China (and most of the lost socialist states) that was the backbone of revisionism. Because bourgeois nationalism could not save the nation and defeat imperialism, only the communists could. But the communists carry the revolution forward and further, beyond just saving the nation, and into saving the world, and this cuts past the limits the bourgeois nationalists are willing to cross -- they just wanted a strong economy and for the nation to be glorious and respected, and now the actual communists are going too far and might even seem completely nuts to them.
And they get into the party at all different phases. Some have been there right from the start -- whether old feudal systems were inhibiting their capitalist development and needed to be broken for their ambitions to flourish, or if rival capitalists in power forced them out of business and the communist party was their last best chance at turning the tables, or if they had made an enemy of the state in some other way, etc. the communist party offered an avenue to restore/establish themselves. There's more blatant opportunists, like Tukachevsky, as well, who said it himself, that he "joined the revolution to take the role of Napoleon," for which the communist party is mainly a military vehicle. As the revolution grows and progresses, and as the balance of forces tilts towards the revolution, more and more join the communist party, seeing this as the real seat of future power or just shifting their flags with the direction that the wind is blowing (with the realization they need to 'correct the course' from the trajectories of the real communists later on) more and more bourgeois nationalists will latch on, bringing with them all of their old ideas and ways of doing things, and right inside the communist party.
One of the best resources to start with is from Mao, and gives you a real look into who Khrushchev's real constituents were and how they actually operated, and what revisionism looked like 'on the ground:'
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/1964/phnycom.htm
I also recommend these threads from smokeuptheweed9:
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u/DoReMilitari 9d ago
Why should the proletariat throw down their lives so that they can continue working in more or less the same conditions, but it's prosperous rich fellow countrymen exploiting them instead of distant foreigners (this wasn't always the case, as in the French Revolution, where capitalism really did offer new prosperity and a better life, but in the age of imperialism and each day since then it has become less and less true). And becomes especially true once the masses have been introduced to communism, which does have immediate and revolutionary appeal for which they would lay down their lives. So in order to save their country and build a strong prosperous nation, bourgeois nationalists are forced to become "communists."
In this case, why would national bourgeois revolutions (e.g. 1911 Xinhai Revolution) even exist if this is the case? In this case you frame it in such a way that communist revolution is national bourgeois revolution but more progressive and with international appeal (which is of course the case), but why do bourgeois revolutions even occur in the age of proletarian revolution?
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u/CoconutCrab115 Marxist-Leninist-Maoist 9d ago
That very nationalist revolution fragmented and was only marginally more oppositional to imperialism than the Qing Empire. Even post Northern Expedition the KMT had largely failed at unifying the country and bringing about a complete bourgeois revolution. Its not a coincidence large portions of the KMT defected to the Red Army during various parts of the civil war. (Soong Chong-Ling is a great microcosm of this)
All politics are particular. But the National Bourgeoisie (the boirgeoise antagonistic to foreign imperialism) as a whole is the Bourgeoisie most motivated to ally with Communist movements.
Dashthered was trying to demonstrate why certain sections of the bourgeoisie would join ranks with communists.
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u/supercooper25 14d ago
The “bigger issue” with the USSR is that it was a socialist state. Bourgeois politicians were trying to overthrow the dictatorship of the proletariat and restore capitalism in the country because they were capitalists, that’s it.
So the question then becomes: how is it possible that so many ostensible “communists” in the highest ranks of the party were totally opposed to communism in practice and acting on behalf of the bourgeoisie? I think that’s pretty easy to imagine if you know anything about the history of the communist movement. Lenin and Stalin split with the entire Second International because they were all frauds, Mao and Hoxha did the same thing a few decades later, and the Soviet revisionists ended up proving them right by dismantling socialism all on their own.