Reminder: Europeans literally cannot accept that imperialism was bad.

[Tigranes]

I don't even know why I even bother editing instead of closing/deleting, but keep away from the handbags, people. This place is like a Middle East peace summit, an Israeli religious group and a Nazist party sharing the same bus.

[lord of flies]

No. In fact, Axis forces outnumbered Soviet troops during the initial stages of Barbarossa, while the Germans still had the initiative. So it wasn't a "much smaller force" at all, more like the opposite.

The Axis inflicted something like a 2:1 military casualty ratio. They very nearly won, in spite of the huge manpower advantage the Soviet Union had.

Oh, and by the way, you still have to prove that without Stalinism, industrialization would have been impossible.

No other major political figure (Zinoviev or Bukharin) supported collectivization. Without collectivization, as I've pointed out about a million times, manpower would have remained in the countryside and there would have been no warm bodies to fill new factories, and thus industrialization would have gone at a much slower pace. It's not really possible to "prove" it beyond stating these basic, easily confirmable facts which make it quite unlikely that industrialization would have gone as quickly as it did. I suppose it's possible that without Stalin, I dunno, Preobrazhensky would become GenSec or whatever, but that's quite unlikely and that sort of silly butterfly effect thing isn't real history.

EDIT: As to the thing about the Raj, it killed (according to you, at least- too lazy to check) 29mil in the 90 or so years it lasted. Stalin killed at least 15mil in 30 years. Thats a whole crapton worse, proportionally speaking. But of course Stalin can do no wrong, and we must ignore these numbers, right?

"At least" 15 million? I'd like to know where you're getting this number.

[heathen]

EDIT: As to the thing about the Raj, it killed (according to you, at least- too lazy to check) 29mil in the 90 or so years it lasted. Stalin killed at least 15mil in 30 years. Thats a whole crapton worse, proportionally speaking. But of course Stalin can do no wrong, and we must ignore these numbers, right?

 

It's not worse, just more efficient. Both are a disgrace on the human race as a whole, and defending either is baffling to me.

[213374U]

The Axis inflicted something like a 2:1 military casualty ratio. They very nearly won, in spite of the huge manpower advantage the Soviet Union had.

No, they didn't "very nearly win". German planning for the invasion of the Soviet Union was flawed at the root. There's this Hitler quote about a kick on the door that I'm sure everyone knows, and it represents his thinking on the matter so well that one would be tempted to think it apocryphal were it not for the fact that Hitler held fast to his idea of a weak Soviet Union until the day he ate a bullet. Axis troops were not prepared for a multi-year operation on the Russian steppe. German military doctrine was, for all its successes, outdated, incomplete and unfit for long-term use in the vast Eurasian plains -- unlike its Soviet counterpart. The German economy not only could not cope with the needs of the military from day one despite being a command economy, but was not completely mobilized until it was already too late and the Axis had lost all strategic momentum... because the Nazi leadership was generally ****ed in the head and basically disconnected from reality (Totaler Krieg speech, 1943).

 

As Thorton_AP has pointed out, it was thanks to the disarray and poor quality of the Soviet officer corps (and the offensive stance that Soviet western formations were deployed on in '41) that the Axis was able to win their initial victories so easily, a lesson the Soviets should have learned in the invasion of Finland, but didn't. Once competent commanders started replacing Stalin's pure yes-men, Germany stood no chance. It wasn't a question of "if", but a question of "when". The high casualties sustained by the Soviets are also at least in part, Stalin's fault, as he stubbornly refused to believe that his pal Hitler had backstabbed him so even in the face of evidence, and later on he kept demanding that his generals launch offensives when they weren't ready. There's also the (in)famous Order 227.

 

In summary, Germany didn't very nearly win at all, not even with the substantial help that Joe Dzhugashvili unwittingly was to them. Barbarossa was a madman's gambit from its conception, if this is perhaps a conclusion that needs of a good deal of hindsight.

 

 

No other major political figure (Zinoviev or Bukharin) supported collectivization. Without collectivization, as I've pointed out about a million times, manpower would have remained in the countryside and there would have been no warm bodies to fill new factories, and thus industrialization would have gone at a much slower pace. It's not really possible to "prove" it beyond stating these basic, easily confirmable facts which make it quite unlikely that industrialization would have gone as quickly as it did.

There's two flaws in this line of reasoning that I can spot at a glance.

 

1. You are assuming that only Bolshevik leaders are valid alternatives to Stalin. Kerensky was left without supporters not only because he was a corrupt, weak twit but because of Bolshevik activity, for instance. This argument only has merit in the sense that it's very much a matter-of-fact one. The Bolsheviks removed all possible rivals they could find, so they only had their own to manage the country. This isn't exactly an excuse, though.

 

2. You are also assuming that only the level of lightning-fast industrialization achieved by Stalin's brutal collectivization was enough to hold Germany in check, and that anything below this would have resulted in an Axis victory in the Eastern front. How lucky for us that Soviet production by 1942 was just the right amount needed to push back the Nazi aggressor, no?

 

If those two could be proven, then yes, Stalin did what he had to and may be excused... but you simply can't prove those, so ol' Joe remains just another power-crazed People's Commissar for Mass Murder.

Edited July 6, 2010 by 213374U

[Walsingham]

Imperialism is not like communism, in particular:

 

a) Because imperialism is about resource extraction, any humanistic accomplishments which may occur being purely accidental and rare.

b) Because imperialism is sexist, racist, homophobic, and transphobic while communism is anti-sexist, anti-racist, anti-homophobia, and anti-transphobia.

c) Because imperialism divides a society, stratifies classes and creates social orders where the rich oppress the poor, while communism unites it and destroys the class system.

 

The revolution and the counter-revolution are not the same because their results and goals are completely different.

 

a) The industrialisation you're so proud of happened specifically because the people of the Soviet Union - itself an empire - were exploited ruthlessly to achieve it.

 

b) The British Empire was certainly sexist, racist, homophobic, and I have no idea what transphobic is. This was the underlying culture of Britain before the Empire. To assert that communist regimes do not indulge these traits when the underlying culture supports them is pure fantasy.

 

c) Communism stratifies society just as badly if not worse, although I don't expect you to accept this because we've already discussed it as great length. All I can say is that it seems incredible that you could think Party Officials, Policemen, Secret Policemen, Soldiers, and other apparatchiks were not classes in their own right with a far more brutal and ruthless supremacy over regular workers and intellectuals than anything seen in Great Britain at the same time. Suffice to say I don't think anyone else is as blind, and would be entertained if anyone else would confirm they agree with you.

[heathen]

You will not have any doubt that psychological time is a mental disease if you look at its collective manifestations: ideologies such as communism, national socialism or any nationalism, or rigid religious belief systems, which operate under the implicit assumption that the highest good lies in the future and that therefore the end justifies the means. The end is an idea, a point in the mind-projected future, when salvation in whatever form -- happiness, fulfillment, equality, liberation -- will be attained.

Not infrequently, the means of getting there involves the enslavement, torture and murder of people in the present. For example, it is estimated that as many as 50 million people were murdered to further the cause of communism, to bring about a "better world" in Russia, China and other countries. This is a chilling example of how belief in a future heaven creates a present hell.