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uncop posted:one's going to make PSL sound like they let clowns in I mean...
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Jul 14, 2020 10:20
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uncop posted:he's known to have seriously worked to improve himself all the time He was still executing prominent communists for trumped up charges into 1950
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Jul 14, 2020 10:27
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMpgJe4pyoo
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Jul 14, 2020 10:54
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The issue of these kinds of mistakes is too complex for me to go into it (although I wouldn't place much trust in narratives on events in Wikipedia). What I was referring to though is that Stalin worked himself to death studying everything he tried to do, he just collected too many responsibilities and events came too fast for any human to be able to stay on top of all of it. But even with all that, I think he's underrated as even a wartime leader and so on. As an aside, I hard reject opposing Stalin to Lenin. I talk mostly about the negatives of Stalin here because I imagine talking about the positives will mostly get people to go basically "uh, sure dude, moving on...", not because I think they're in different leagues somehow. The issue is, Stalin can't really be honestly presented in a way that satisfies the expectations people have of their heroes/idols, that they're basically ethically good and likable people that they'd feel safe around. So praising him is instinctively alien to anyone who considers it right for their heroes to be canceled over being terrible to people who didn't deserve it in any way. But I think that's a liberal misunderstanding of heroism that's based on one-sided tellings of stories. With Lenin, that kind of stuff is typically just not mentioned out of respect, while with Stalin everyone is immediately going to go there. Sure, Lenin wouldn't have made the exact same mistakes, but he was still just a dude. Their personal differences were not so consequential as to determine the broad strokes of where the USSR was going to go. The organizational structures that Stalin held onto were laid down by Lenin, and Stalin didn't distort his principles. The answer to the problems the USSR ended up facing wouldn't have been to channel Lenin in a more pure way, it would have been to discover something new that couldn't have been theorised before the problem that needed to be solved actually existed. And Stalin did successfully take on a bunch of those: in a way you could say that he was greater than Lenin, if only because he was able to be his student.
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Jul 14, 2020 12:00
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uncop posted:The issue of these kinds of mistakes is too complex for me to go into it (although I wouldn't place much trust in narratives on events in Wikipedia). What I was referring to though is that Stalin worked himself to death studying everything he tried to do, he just collected too many responsibilities and events came too fast for any human to be able to stay on top of all of it. But even with all that, I think he's underrated as even a wartime leader and so on. Yeah the Nazi German general staff were incredibly stressed out during their genocide campaign as well, I still don't have any sympathy or respect for them
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Jul 14, 2020 13:54
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I had the impression that Stalin's significant contribution as a "wartime leader" was that he became LESS involved in the generalship of the war as time went on, not more (and in contrast to Hitler, who did turn into a battalion-pushing micromanager).
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Jul 14, 2020 14:02
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if they let me use pause i bet i could manage the whole of the eastern front. just gotta have a good wristpad
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Jul 14, 2020 14:09
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stalin was intensely personally involved in every major decision, military and civilian during the war and did a lot of frankly mind-boggling work with turning soviet society into a wholly military camp while maintaining civilian control re: the comparison between lenin and stalin, i maintain that lenin was much more an emigre intellectual politician where stalin was a partisan, bank robber and labour leader. the exile party and the underground party are legitimately different structures and while the wartime organisation became something very different, stalin does seem to have continued his underground party mentality after the civil war resolved, which it seems reasonable to assume that lenin would've handled in a different way - and which would've had consequences, especially for how the inner party functioned
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Jul 14, 2020 14:58
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Stalin's APM is unprecedented in both pre-millennial and present history. Man could really micro.
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Jul 14, 2020 15:02
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Victory Position posted:Stalin's APM is unprecedented in both pre-millennial and present history. Man could really micro.
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Jul 14, 2020 15:26
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Enjoy posted:Yeah the Nazi German general staff were incredibly stressed out during their genocide campaign as well, I still don't have any sympathy or respect for them This was funny, I enjoyed it. gradenko_2000 posted:I had the impression that Stalin's significant contribution as a "wartime leader" was that he became LESS involved in the generalship of the war as time went on, not more (and in contrast to Hitler, who did turn into a battalion-pushing micromanager). There are lots of outright lies about bizarre antics from Stalin that flew during the destalinization era, such as the whole post-barbarossa despair and shutdown story. Good for an officer's career to have someone to blame for mistakes. I don't think I've heard much evidence that he was a terrific military leader though, the real achievement was the integration of civilian and military matters so that somehow the USSR held organizationally during an intense and unrelenting crisis, and was able to increase its fighting ability faster than Germany could with its civilians living basically normal lives. His detractors don't tend to appreciate just how much WW2 USSR's internal social response to crisis had changed from WW1 Russia's. The pre-war purges of the officers and others get a ton of poo poo, but I believe historians who put more emphasis on the civilian and political aspect of warfare have presented it more as a tradeoff that may have paid off. It depends on how much the Soviet officers overestimated their worth, how easily could they have halted Barbarossa compared to the worse organized purged Red Army. Better military KDRs don't matter if it ends in demoralization, defections and surrender against a genocidal enemy.
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Jul 14, 2020 15:48
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Victory Position posted:Stalin's APM is unprecedented in both pre-millennial and present history. Man could really micro.
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Jul 14, 2020 15:50
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Victory Position posted:Stalin's APM is unprecedented in both pre-millennial and present history. Man could really micro.
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Jul 14, 2020 15:56
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Victory Position posted:Stalin's APM is unprecedented in both pre-millennial and present history. Man could really micro. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_76-vZzkChQ
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Jul 14, 2020 16:01
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uncop posted:This was funny, I enjoyed it. Part of 'it is also how the winter war was re-written, the traditional narrative was that it was a complete debacle from beginning to finish. In reality, the first weeks of the war did indeed go quite poorly for the Soviets but by March 1940, Soviet forces were under much better leadership and Finnish defenses were rapidly collapsing. The Soviets accepted Finnish surrender at that point out of fear that Britain and France (who could reach the Baltic before the occupation of Denmark) would enter the war (possibly make a deal with Hitler since the Western front had been frozen for months and it had seemed the allies had just declared out of obligation to Poland). Anyway, most of what people know Stalin for (collectivization, five-year plans, the great famine, the great purge) were both all tied up a deteriorating trade situation from the mid-1920s onward and had little to do with dogmatism but that the USSR was in a very poor fiscal and economic position for much of its early history and there was a fair degree of incompetence. Granted, Lenin didn't have any ideas of how to fix things either, so I guess you could have said he would have been more competent and a lighter hand but most of what happened under Stalin was probably going to happen at some point. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 16:05 on Jul 14, 2020 |
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Jul 14, 2020 16:01
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Enjoy posted:Yeah the Nazi German general staff were incredibly stressed out during their genocide campaign as well, I still don't have any sympathy or respect for them lol
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Jul 14, 2020 16:01
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Lenin had no idea what to do after taking power
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Jul 14, 2020 16:03
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Ardennes posted:The Soviets accepted Finnish surrender at that point out of fear that Britain and France (who could reach the Baltic before the occupation of Denmark) would enter the war (possibly make a deal with Hitler since the Western front had been frozen for months and it had seemed the allies had just declared out of obligation to Poland). lol I actually had this exact scenario play out when playing Hearts of Iron yesterday - the Allies declared war on me, landed troops in Helsinki, and since the Baltic fleet was way too small to challenge the Royal Navy I had to keep fighting British and French divisions in Finland. Only (monarchist) Germany marching into Paris stopped the intervention.
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Jul 14, 2020 16:05
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Kurnugia posted:Lenin had no idea what to do after taking power excuse me he got a dope chateau and sled-car
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Jul 14, 2020 16:08
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Kurnugia posted:Lenin had no idea what to do after taking power Being the leader of a party is pretty different than being the executive of a war-torn minimally industrialized country, even by 1918, they knew they were in a bit of a pickle. gradenko_2000 posted:lol I actually had this exact scenario play out when playing Hearts of Iron yesterday - the Allies declared war on me, landed troops in Helsinki, and since the Baltic fleet was way too small to challenge the Royal Navy I had to keep fighting British and French divisions in Finland. Yeah, Britain and France (at least to April) had the ability to control waterways leading to Finland and could absolutely certainly dump enough troops and material to bog down any Soviet advance on Helsinki. In the US, in particular, the Winter War has become a fairy tale. I think the big issue with Barbarossa was simply relying on a poor overall battle strategy that prioritized politics over effectiveness. It is clear Soviet forces needed to pull back to a much more defensible line and if they had done so, the war would have likely been much shorter. Stalin deserved his share of blame there. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 16:23 on Jul 14, 2020 |
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Jul 14, 2020 16:13
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Ardennes posted:Being the leader of a party is pretty different than being the executive of a war-torn minimally industrialized country, even by 1918, they knew they were in a bit of a pickle. Yeah, and the answer of democratic centralism was Stalin. Lenin didnt goresee the carnage sure, but he built the party and put the man in charge. Understanding completely how to do a revolution doesnt mean we should take anything else from the Lenin. The structure of leninism was a set-up for failure, and its failure almost doomed the CCP, until they decided to play with the imperialists for development investments. We'll see if the CCP can reform and recover itself from going down the capitalist path, but frankly, with the growing overlap between the Party and bourgeois managerial class, i doubt there is any hope for a revolutionary future when it comes to the CCP
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Jul 14, 2020 16:27
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Ardennes posted:Part of 'it is also how the winter war was re-written, the traditional narrative was that it was a complete debacle from beginning to finish. In reality, the first weeks of the war did indeed go quite poorly for the Soviets but by March 1940, Soviet forces were under much better leadership and Finnish defenses were rapidly collapsing. The Soviets accepted Finnish surrender at that point out of fear that Britain and France (who could reach the Baltic before the occupation of Denmark) would enter the war (possibly make a deal with Hitler since the Western front had been frozen for months and it had seemed the allies had just declared out of obligation to Poland). I would like to know more about the Winter War. It was always framed to me as an act of aggression with seemingly no rationale, I assume there’s more going on?
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Jul 14, 2020 16:29
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Lightning Knight posted:I would like to know more about the Winter War. It was always framed to me as an act of aggression with seemingly no rationale, I assume there’s more going on? Why would you assume that? Finland was of strategic importance. It was pure realpolitik.
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Jul 14, 2020 16:30
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Kurnugia posted:Yeah, and the answer of democratic centralism was Stalin. Lenin didnt goresee the carnage sure, but he built the party and put the man in charge. Understanding completely how to do a revolution doesnt mean we should take anything else from the Lenin. I don't know if you are taking the right lessons from what transpired. Lenin and Stalin (as did Mao then Deng) had to respond to hard and fast macro-economic issues, issues that any revolutionary state is going to face. The answer is what could have been done differently here (at least from 1918 to 1933). Lightning Knight posted:I would like to know more about the Winter War. It was always framed to me as an act of aggression with seemingly no rationale, I assume there’s more going on? The Soviet Union was on the offensive, don't get me wrong, but a lot of it was about creating buffer zone for Leningrad and Murmansk as a primary objective. If the Finns had actually collapsed, the Soviets would have probably put Finnish Communists in charge (similar to Mongolia). You have to remember too that Soviet-Finnish relations were poor in part because Finland had declared independence after 1917 but also had its own internal civil war its left-right wing. The White forces (who would become the Finnish government) were pretty brutal in how they treated the Communists and certainly there was still a legacy of the civil war period during the Winter War. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 16:41 on Jul 14, 2020 |
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Jul 14, 2020 16:38
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The finnish response to any and all demands by stalin was 'gently caress you' which is also kinda unoptimal if you wanna negotiate. And suspicious, if youre stalin and wondering if the finns are getting secret aid and guarantees from hitler
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Jul 14, 2020 16:39
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Kurnugia posted:The finnish response to any and all demands by stalin was 'gently caress you' which is also kinda unoptimal if you wanna negotiate. And suspicious, if youre stalin and wondering if the finns are getting secret aid and guarantees from hitler It's true that Hitler's hand was everywhere at that point in time. He had secret agreements with many nations you wouldn't expect. For example, the USSR
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Jul 14, 2020 16:42
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Ardennes posted:I don't know if you are taking the right lessons from what transpired. Lenin and Stalin (as did Mao then Deng) had to respond to hard and fast macro-economic issues, issues that any revolutionary state is going to face. Well if the answer to such economic questions is always 'stalin' then this marxism business really has no hope. Point being, an ideological system produces leaders that embody its values, and if the answer is always going to be self-consuming horror that goes after the kinds of comrades that Mao and Stalin primarily targeted, then clearly theres something extremely wrong with lenins ideas for post-revolutionary order and its construction
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Jul 14, 2020 16:47
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Enjoy posted:Why would you assume that? because that is an actual reason as opposed to “the soviets invaded Finland because they were dicks” which is not a useful statement. edit: like to be clear I’m not saying “actually invading Finland was cool and good” I am saying “I have no idea why the Soviet Union invaded Finland and wish to know more.”.
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Jul 14, 2020 16:55
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stalin
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Jul 14, 2020 16:57
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GalacticAcid posted:stalin
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Jul 14, 2020 17:00
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Kurnugia posted:Well if the answer to such economic questions is always 'stalin' then this marxism business really has no hope. Point being, an ideological system produces leaders that embody its values, and if the answer is always going to be self-consuming horror that goes after the kinds of comrades that Mao and Stalin primarily targeted, then clearly theres something extremely wrong with lenins ideas for post-revolutionary order and its construction I think you buy into "great-man" theory too much, it is less about the leaders or their teacher and more about historical situation they are in. The Great Purge and the Cultural Revolution happened under exactly the same economic circumstances, both governments were pretty much broke. So the question becomes how does a revolutionary government exist without massive economic pressure being placed on it? The answer turns out to be Dengism.
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Jul 14, 2020 17:02
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Ardennes posted:The Soviet Union was on the offensive, don't get me wrong, but a lot of it was about creating buffer zone for Leningrad and Murmansk as a primary objective. If the Finns had actually collapsed, the Soviets would have probably put Finnish Communists in charge (similar to Mongolia). I think long term Finland would have been integrated into the rest of the USSR. The Soviets were pretty consistent in maintaining that the old Tsarist borders of Russia were the legitimate borders of the Soviet Union. Mongolia wasn't explicitly part of the Russian Empire so it stayed it's own state after the revolution. For the same reason Tannu Tuva technically maintained its independence for so long. If there was some different orientation towards Finland I'd be happy to know.
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Jul 14, 2020 17:03
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The border between the USSR and Finland was based on the old border of the Duchy of Finland. The USSR wanted to trade some land to move the border out farther from Leningrad so that the border wasn't right up against the city, and were willing to trade back land to Finland elsewhere in the north. The Finns refused to strike a deal, and after the USSR had gotten a guarantee from Germany that they'd stay out of it, the Soviets invaded to impose their demands by force.
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Jul 14, 2020 17:07
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gradenko_2000 posted:The border between the USSR and Finland was based on the old border of the Duchy of Finland. Hm. Interesting. Was it a fair deal?
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Jul 14, 2020 17:11
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Lightning Knight posted:Hm. Interesting. Was it a fair deal? I'm not super well read on the subject but as far as I can tell the Soviets were willing to give up more land than they were asking for, just by area, though I guess not all land is equally valued.
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Jul 14, 2020 17:14
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Kurnugia posted:Well if the answer to such economic questions is always 'stalin' then this marxism business really has no hope. Point being, an ideological system produces leaders that embody its values, and if the answer is always going to be self-consuming horror that goes after the kinds of comrades that Mao and Stalin primarily targeted, then clearly theres something extremely wrong with lenins ideas for post-revolutionary order and its construction Leninism, not general marxism. The tendency to become an autocratic dictatorship is inherently prefigured in the idea of a vanguard party. Arguably mao's mass line was an attempt to counter that tendency without abandoning the leninist framework. It failed harder then the sozdem's attempt to counter captial's tendencies without abandoning a liberal democratic framework.
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Jul 14, 2020 17:14
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Ardennes posted:I think you buy into "great-man" theory too much, it is less about the leaders or their teacher and the historical situation they are in. The Great Purge and the Cultural Revolution happened under exactly the same economic circumstances, both governments were pretty much broke. Ardennes posted:So the question becomes how does a revolutionary government exist without massive economic pressure being placed on it? The answer turns out to be Dengism.
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Jul 14, 2020 17:16
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gradenko_2000 posted:I'm not super well read on the subject but as far as I can tell the Soviets were willing to give up more land than they were asking for, just by area, though I guess not all land is equally valued. That’s my thinking, that land up north with some permafrost or poo poo isn’t worth as much as prime real estate next to a big city. I will have to go find a book about this.
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Jul 14, 2020 17:23
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i'm sure USSR wanted to trade away primo real estate for useless land out of the goodness of their hearts, and Finland said 'no' because they wanted to be dicks
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Jul 14, 2020 17:43
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Kurnugia posted:frankly, with the growing overlap between the Party and bourgeois managerial class, i doubt there is any hope for a revolutionary future when it comes to the CCP Believe it or not the vast majority of the cpc is still composed of rural peasants which is one of the reasons the countryside is governed so differently from the urban areas. Internal party politics still greatly favour the farmers and fishermen that make up the cpsu. By that standard the cpc is presently far more representative of it's working class than the later day cpsu.
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Jul 14, 2020 17:52
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