In my continued exposure to leftist spaces and a leftist view on history it has become clear that all I understand about Stalin is the reactionary rhetoric I’ve been fed my whole life. I have only just started on reading theory and exposing myself to a leftist view, so Stalin as a topic isn’t something I’ve reached yet.
But I have to ask, and I think this is the place to ask it, what is the deal with Stalin?
The vibe I get is that people at a minimum don’t hate Stalin, but also maybe at most appricate Stalin. I’m aware that the efforts of the USSR during WW2, especially in regards to Nazi aggression are a credit to his administration and leadership, but is that really where the vibe starts and stops?
I’m not looking for a dissertation on the guy, but just the notes or primary points. I’ll take reading suggestions too.
Thanks comrades.
Correct. If you look at actual, modern, and active leftist movements around the world, they’ll proudly praise Lenin, Marx, maybe even Mao and other figures, but Stalin is usually absent.
Part of it is optics, I’m sure, but the other part is Stalin didn’t really write too much valuable theory nor tactics. Yes, he lead the USSR to victory in WWII, but it’s not relevant to every country and leftist movement whereas Lenin’s theories were and continue to be relevant. Stalin’s country’s survival meant it could help colonized people fight back and that’s why these movements and countries usually don’t hate him. But he is long gone now, and now that appreciation has shifted over to the Russian Federstion.
The closest you’ll get to modern praise is China saying that one major reason for the USSR’s fall is the slander of Stalin and the (largely) incoherent soviet ideology after his death. Also Russia and Belarus talking about the USSR defeating Nazis without mentioning who commanded the Red Army lol.
Stalin’s contributions to the world is not just defeating the Nazis, ok?
Stalin was an economic and financial genius, whose groundbreaking Five-Year Plans pulled the USSR from the NEP rut and propelled it into a highly industrialized society capable of rivaling the more advanced capitalist West. It is debatable whether the USSR would have been capable of defeating Nazi Germany’s invasion if it had continued to stick with the NEP model, but it is undeniable that Soviet industrialization took off exponentially from 1929 onwards, marking the beginning of the first Five-Year Plan.
The Five-Year Plans were subsequently adopted by China and a variant of it by the DPRK. Heck, even South Korea, a right-wing dictatorship, emulated the Soviet Five-Year Plan to pull itself ahead of the DPRK - before implementing the Five-Year Plans in the 1960s, South Korea’s GDP per capita struggled to exceed even one third of the DPRK’s (even after all that bombing during the Korean War). Copying Stalin’s Five-Year Plan enabled South Korea to rapidly industrialize and transform itself into an economic powerhouse rivaling Japan’s economic miracle (I am simplifying here as I am omitting the role of chaebol (a form of nepotistic capitalism) and the state-run banking sector, but the Five-Year Plan was a key breakthrough for the South Korean economy in the 1970s)
Next, let’s talk about sociology. Stalin’s Marxism and the National Question (1912-13) is hailed as one of the most important Marxist work on resolving the contradictions of the national question. Employing dialectical and historical materialism, Stalin boiled down the complex problems and formulated the theoretical foundations on the national question. The following sentence would turn out to be one of the most important contributions from Stalin to the field of Marxist sociology:
Importantly, the principles derived by Stalin in Marxism and the National Question would form the basis of China’s classification of its 56 ethnic groups (“nationalities”) in the 1950s, which is still in use to this day. The key breakthrough here is that the principles can be applied across varying developmental stages of capital formation, as these characteristics had already formed their latent potential in the pre-capitalist stage, and are realized and took their prominent forms throughout the different stages of capitalist development - this attracted the attention and became the guiding principles of the CPC’s pioneering work on formulating their own national/ethnic classification.
Lenin loved it so much that he proudly proclaimed the work as the “Bolshevism’s theoretical and programmatic declaration on the national question”. Even Trotsky - Stalin’s arch-nemesis - conceded that this was one of the most important works Stalin has ever produced, even throwing the jabs “hmm… how come Stalin never wrote anything of this quality before and after that, was it really written by Stalin?” lol. Historians agree that while Lenin had contributed some ideas to the work, there is no reason to doubt that the work was essentially Stalin’s.
I didn’t say that.
All of what you said contributed to movements and countries, but it doesn’t change the fact that most of them don’t want to mention Stalin, which is what OP is asking about.